The world's fastest supercomputer has come online at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. The machine, called "ElCapitan," was unveiled earlier this month after about eight years in development. It will be used to protect U.S. nuclear stockpiles and classified research.
With a peak performance of 2.746exaFLOPS, ElCapitan is the National Nuclear Security Administration’s first exascale supercomputer. It is the world's third exascale machine, following the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois.
The world's fastest supercomputer is powered by more than 11 million CPU and GPU cores integrated into more than 43,000 AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. Each MI300AAPU contains an EPYCGenoa 24-core CPU clocked at 1.8GHz and a CDNA3 GPU integrated in a single organic package, along with 128GB of HBM3 memory.
According to Pythagoras Watson, leader of LLNL's Advanced Technology Systems Team, the system's peak performance is 2.79 petaflops. To give a sense of how astronomically large this number is, Watson explained to CBS News that if you go back 2.79 quadrillion seconds, you'd arrive more than 70 billion years before the Big Bang.
The world's newest supercomputer cost about $600 million to build and will be used primarily to protect and secure the U.S. nuclear arsenal, but it will also perform other classified tasks related to national security, including artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. It will also address problems in materials science and physics.
ElCapitan is part of the CORAL-2 program commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy to replace the Sierra supercomputer deployed in 2018. While Sierra is still in service, ElCapitan is far faster and more efficient than Sierra, with an 18x performance improvement. As LiveScience points out, Sierra is still running and was recently ranked the 14th most powerful supercomputer in the world.
ElCapitan, which shares its name with the famous granite rock formation in Yosemite National Park, became fully operational last year and achieved a score of 1.742exaFLOPS on the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a global benchmark used to judge supercomputing speed. According to LLNL, it would take a million smartphones performing a calculation simultaneously to reach the speed that ElCapitan can complete in one second.