El Capitan: The World’s Fastest Supercomputer Powered by AMD
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has officially unveiled El Capitan, a groundbreaking supercomputer that has earned the title of the world’s fastest. With an astonishing performance of 1.742 exaflops, this AMD-powered system can perform 1.742 quintillion calculations per second. This represents a 20-fold increase over the lab’s previous flagship system.
El Capitan is the result of a collaboration between the National Nuclear Security Administration, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and AMD. The construction of this supercomputer, which is powered by over 44,000 AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing units, cost a whopping $600 million.
The primary purpose of El Capitan is to support national security missions. This includes tasks such as nuclear stockpile stewardship and weapons simulation, eliminating the need for underground testing.
“This level of computational power allows us to solve ensembles of problems on El Capitan in hours or days that could take weeks or even months to execute on current systems,” said Rob Neely, director of Lawrence Livermore’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program.
Not only is El Capitan powerful, but it’s also energy efficient. It ranks 18th on the Green500 list, consuming over 35 megawatts of power while delivering 58.89 gigaflops per watt.
Source: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory