(Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Following years of development, the US' El Capitan supercomputer now ranks as the world's fastest, dethroning the previous champion, Frontier, another US exascale computer.
In a recent verified test, El Capitan achieved 1.742 exaFLOPs of performance or 1.742 quintillion calculations per second, according to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where the supercomputer is based.
"This state-of-the-art system marks a monumental leap forward in HPC [high-performance computing], enabling unprecedented modeling and simulation capability," the lab says.
Top500, which benchmarks and catalogs the world’s fastest supercomputers, previously ranked Frontier and Aurora as the two top machines. In this latest round, the AMD-powered Frontier was benchmarked at 1.35 exaFLOPs, while its top theoretical speed was rated at 2.05 exaFLOPs. The same machine can also access up to 24 megawatts of power.
In contrast, El Capitan—which also uses AMD chips—promises a peak performance of 2.79 exaFLOPs over nearly 30 megawatts of electricity. The machine also boasts a "22-fold peak increase" over Sierra, which was the world’s second-fastest supercomputer in 2018 but slipped to the 12th spot in June.
"Complex, high-resolution 3D simulations that would take weeks or months on Sierra will be done in just hours or days on El Capitan, leading to previously unimaginable insights,” the lab adds.
(Top500)Top500 adds that El Capitan features "11,039,616 combined CPU and GPU cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators." For comparison, the second-place Frontier boasts 9 million combined cores.
The news comes after the US government funded the development of three "exascale" supercomputers—El Capitan, Frontier, and the Intel-powered Aurora—taking the technology to the next level. In 2019, the US Department of Energy said it was spending $600 million to develop El Capitan with the goal of using the machine to conduct computer simulations testing nuclear weapons.
The results promise to help the US ensure its nuclear stockpile remains in working order without conducting live nuclear tests. In addition, El Capitan will also conduct research on projects such as fusion energy, climate science, and drug discovery.
According to Top500, the US has the top four fastest supercomputers, though China's own exascale computers could be even faster. We don't know for sure, however, since the country has opted not to share details with the Top500 organization.