El Capitan verified as world's fastest supercomputer

LLNL, in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, have officially unveiled El Capitan as the world's most powerful supercomputer and first exascale system dedicated to national security. Verified at 1.742 exaflops (1.742 quintillion calculations per second) on the High Performance Linpack—the standard benchmark used by the Top500 organization to evaluate supercomputing performance—El Capitan is the fastest computing system ever benchmarked. The system has a total peak performance of 2.79 exaflops. The Top500 list was released at the 2024 Supercomputing Conference in Atlanta. As NNSA’s first exascale supercomputer, El Capitan is a premier resource for the NNSA Tri-Labs—LLNL, and Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories—to advance nuclear weapon science and scientific discovery, providing the vast computational power necessary to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing. This state-of-the-art system marks a monumental leap forward in HPC, enabling unprecedented modeling and simulation capability essential for NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program that certifies the U.S. nuclear stockpile, and other critical nuclear security missions such as nonproliferation and counterterrorism. El Capitan also will support novel new AI-based workflows to address emerging challenges in the NNSA mission, including material discovery, design optimization, advanced manufacturing, digital twins and intelligent AI assistants trained on classified data. Advances in these national security capabilities will impact the broader mission of the DOE and the scientific community at large, including clean energy, climate science, seismic modeling and building a more efficient and agile enterprise based on advanced computing. Read more at LLNL News.