The world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, has been officially launched at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. The system, which cost $600 million to develop, will primarily be used for national security research, including ensuring the safety of the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
Since underground nuclear testing was prohibited in 1992, advanced computing has played a key role in simulating and maintaining nuclear weapon capabilities. El Capitan will perform complex calculations to assess stockpile safety and reliability without live testing.
In addition to nuclear weapon research, El Capitan will be used for high-energy-density physics, material discovery, nuclear data analysis, and other classified projects. The supercomputer is expected to enhance research capabilities across multiple scientific disciplines.
El Capitan reached a performance of 1.742 exaFLOPS on the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world. It is only the third system to achieve exascale computing, with a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS.
The second-fastest supercomputer, Frontier, based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Illinois, has a peak performance of 2.056 exaFLOPS. El Capitan surpasses Frontier in standard and peak performance, making it the most powerful computing system globally.
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El Capitan was developed under the US Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 programme as a successor to the Sierra supercomputer, which was deployed in 2018. Despite being replaced, Sierra remains operational and was ranked as the 14th most powerful supercomputer in the latest Top500 rankings.