When supercomputer maker Cray Computing, which was acquired by HP in 2019, Since he was going to install El Capitan, he expected the computer to reach a peak performance of 1.5 exaflops. Today is the 64th edition — The long-running ranking of the world’s non-distributed supercomputers has been published, and El Capitan not only exceeded that prediction with a speed of 1,742 exaflops, but is currently the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
El Capitan is only the third “exascale” computer, meaning it can perform more than a quintillion calculations per second. The other two, called Frontier and Aurora, currently claim the second and third spots on the TOP500. Not surprisingly, these giant machines all reside in government research facilities: El Capitan is located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory claims Aurora. Cray had a hand in all three systems.
El Capitan has over 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors. Each of these 24-core processors is rated at 1.8 GHz and features AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. It’s also relatively efficient, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt as such systems go.
If you’re wondering why El Capitan was built, the answer is for nuclear storage security, but it could also be used for nuclear terrorism. Because it is more powerful than expected, it may take a long time before another exascale computer overtakes it on the throne.
