When supercomputer maker Cray Computing, which was acquired by HP in 2019, announced it would build El Capitan, it expected the computer’s peak performance to reach 1.5 exaflops. The 64th edition of the TOP500 (a long-term ranking of the world’s non-distributed supercomputers) was released today, and El Capitan not only exceeded that prediction by clocking 1.742 exaflops, but also became the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Won the title of computer. The world now.
El Capitan is only the third “exascale” computer, meaning it can perform more than 1 quintillion calculations per second. The remaining two are called Frontier and Aurora, and currently occupy the second and third slots in the TOP500. Naturally, all of these giant machines are housed inside government research facilities. El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Argonne National Laboratory claims the aurora borealis. Clay was involved in all three systems.
El Capitan has over 11 million CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors. Each of these 24-core processors is rated at 1.8 GHz and is powered by an AMD Instinct M1300A APU. It’s also relatively efficient for such a system, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 gigaflops per watt.
If you’re wondering what El Capitan was built for, the answer is to address nuclear stockpile safety, but it can also be used to counter nuclear terrorism. It’s more powerful than expected, and will likely reign supreme for a while until another exascale computer overtakes it.
