Livermore National Laboratory in California launched the $600 million El Capitan supercomputer, which became the fastest in the world. This computer will be used to perform important and secret tasks. This was reported by Space.com.
El Capitan will be used for national security research, including the development of new materials, high-density energy physics, nuclear data analysis, and weapons design. One of the supercomputer's tasks will be to ensure the safety of the US nuclear arsenal without the need for underground testing.
In fact, the supercomputer, which had been in development since May 2023, was launched in November 2024, but operation began only on January 9, 2025. After the first launch, El Capitan's performance was estimated at 1,742 exaFLOPS, and its peak performance was 2,746 exaFLOPS. It is the third supercomputer in history to achieve this speed.
The performance of supercomputers like El Capitan is measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS), where each operation is a mathematical calculation. Laptops can reach several hundred gigaFLOPS (1 trillion operations), while exaFLOPS is 1 quintillion (10^18) operations per second.
The closest supercomputer to El Capitan is Frontier at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Its standard performance is 1,353 exaFLOPS, and its peak performance is 2,056 exaFLOPS.
El Capitan, developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, achieves this performance through the use of 44,544 AMD MI300A accelerators, which combine AMD EPYC Genoa chips and AMD CDNA3 graphics. They have more than 11 million cores and are equipped with 128 GB of high-bandwidth memory shared by the CPU and graphics.