All hail our new leader — AMD-powered El Capitan becomes officially the world’s fastest supercomputer

El Capitan can deliver peak performance of 2.7 exaflops and 1.7 exaflops of sustained performance

· TechRadar

News By James Capell published 18 November 2024

(Image credit: LLNL)
  • El Capitan is the new world leader in raw computing power
  • It is situated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)
  • El Capitan is powered by AMD instinct MI300A APUs

The global supercomputing leaderboard has a new presence at top spot, as the AMD-powered El Capitan takes over prime position to become the world's most powerful setup.

With a sustained compute power of 1.7 exaflops and a peak of over 2.7 exaflops, El Capitan knocks previous leader Frontier to second on the list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

El Capitan was built by HPE for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to simulate nuclear weapons tests. It is powered by AMD instinct MI300A APUs and is not only the fastest but also in the top 20 of the greenest computers too.

Computations reduced from months to weeks

For perspective, El Capitan can achieve a task in less than one second that requires one human to do one calculation every second since the earth formed and then again for nine more earths.

The supercomputer will enable LLNL to significantly improve the ability to predict and model nuclear weapon performance as the stockpile gets older and new systems are introduced.

This will help LLNL to better understand and make informed decisions for safety. It will also be leveraged for a range of other missions to help understand emergencies such as natural disasters and manmade crises.

It does this by providing higher resolutions in 3D modelling that were either not possible with previous machines or too computationally expensive to regularly run.

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