It clocks in at 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 compute nodes and 5.
4375 petabytes of memory. It’s now the most powerful computer in the world, and it’s here to help build nukes. On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its newest supercomputer, and announced that it had reached the peak of the TOP500 list, which benchmarks the world’s most powerful computers.
It’s only the third supercomputer to reach exascale computing, meaning it can process at least 1 quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS). The system was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them. “This tremendous accomplishment, years in the making and the result of tireless efforts by hundreds of dedicated employees in this large collaborative team, is a testament to the Laboratory’s leadership in driving scientific discovery.
It continues a legacy of supercomputing excellence that spans more than 70 years,” Kim Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said in a statement. “El Capitan’s extraordinary computing capabilities will allow us to tackle complex challenges that were previously out of reach. We are proud to lead this achievement in partnership with industry, and advance science in ways that will benefi.