The El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Garry McLeod/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The top spot in the ranking of the world’s most powerful computers has changed hands, with one supercomputer built for US national security research taking the top spot.
Top500The definitive list of the most powerful computers is based on a single metric: how fast a machine can solve multiple equations, measured in floating-point operations per second, or FLOPS. A machine called The limit Built in 2022 it was the first publicly recognized to reach exascale: a billion FLOPS.
Frontier was created by Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to conduct nuclear weapons simulations, but also to work on a wide range of complex scientific problems, such as climate modeling, nuclear fusion simulation, and drug discovery.
Now, California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has created the El Capitan, capable of 1,742 exaFLOPS, more than any other supercomputer.
The machine was built in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy that develops nuclear weapons science under strict security. The agency was created in 2000 after it was discovered that nuclear secrets had been leaked to China from the Department of Energy.
El Capitan will essentially provide the massive computing power needed to ensure the effectiveness of the US nuclear deterrent without the need to conduct physical nuclear tests. LLNL says that in Sierra, the most powerful system to date, complex, high-resolution 3D simulations of nuclear explosions that would take months will be carried out on El Capitan in hours or days.
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