El Capitan, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The world’s fastest supercomputer, called “El Capitan”, is now operational. It will be used to protect US nuclear reserves and for confidential research activities.
The fastest supercomputer in the world was at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNNL) in California on January 9th.
“The Captain” will work on several sensitive and confidential US tasks, including security of the nuclear weapons stockpile.
As detailed by LNNL, cited by , the investigation will focus mainly on national security, including the discovery of materials, high energy density physics, nuclear data and weapons design, as well as other top secret tasks.
El Capitan became the world’s fastest computer when it became fully operational last year, with a score of 1,742 exaFLOPS on the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark test – a test used to evaluate supercomputing speeds around the world.
With a peak performance of 2,746 exaFLOPS, El Capitan is only the third computer to achieve computing speeds exascale.
The second fastest supercomputer in the world is currently the supercomputer Frontier from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Illinois. This supercomputer achieved a standard performance of 1,353 exaFLOPS with a peak of 2,056 exaFLOPS.
El Capitan had a cost of 600 million dollars and was ordered by the US Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program to replace the Sierra supercomputer, installed in 2018, and which is still in operation.
