The World Has a New Most Powerful Supercomputer. It’s Going to Build Nukes

It clocks successful astatine 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 compute nodes and 5.4375 petabytes of memory. It’s present the astir almighty machine successful the world, and it’s present to assistance physique nukes.

On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its newest supercomputer, and announced that it had reached the highest of the TOP500 list, which benchmarks the world’s astir almighty computers. It’s lone the 3rd supercomputer to scope exascale computing, meaning it tin process astatine slightest 1 quintillion floating constituent operations per 2nd (FLOPS).

The strategy was built by the lab, on with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which volition usage it to exemplary and simulate capabilities for atomic weapons, helping to guarantee the bureau doesn’t request to really detonate bombs to trial them.

“This tremendous accomplishment, years successful the making and the effect of tireless efforts by hundreds of dedicated employees successful this ample collaborative team, is simply a testament to the Laboratory’s enactment successful driving technological discovery. It continues a bequest of supercomputing excellence that spans much than 70 years,” Kim Budil, the manager of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said successful a statement. “El Capitan’s bonzer computing capabilities volition let america to tackle analyzable challenges that were antecedently retired of reach. We are arrogant to pb this accomplishment successful concern with industry, and beforehand subject successful ways that volition payment nine and the federation arsenic a whole.”

El Capitan is much than 20 times arsenic almighty arsenic the National Nuclear Security Administration’s erstwhile supercomputer, Sierra, and tin execute high-resolution 3D simulations that would person taken Sierra months successful a substance of hours oregon days, the laboratory said successful its property release. Its imaginable highest show could emergence arsenic precocious arsenic 2.79 exaFLOPS.

The erstwhile astir almighty machine successful the world, called Frontier, is located astatine Oak Ridge National Laboratory and clocks successful astatine 1.353 exaFLOPS. The 3rd astir powerful, Aurora, is astatine Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, successful Illinois, and achieves 1.012 exaFLOPS. Both were besides built by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

Processing 58.89 gigaFLOPS per watt of vigor consumed, El Capitan is little vigor businesslike than Frontier, which began operating successful 2022 and works astatine 62.68 gigaFLOPS per watt. However, it’s much businesslike than Aurora’s 26.15 gigaFLOPS per watt.

“El Capitan marks different important milestone successful exascale supercomputing, bringing monumental performance, vigor ratio and the capabilities to accelerate AI-driven technological find and marque unthinkable breakthroughs to fortify nationalist information and unlock caller opportunities successful renewable energy,” Trish Damkroger, a high-performance computing enforcement astatine Hewlett Packard Enterprise, said successful a statement.