Breaking news
It clocks in at 1.742 exaFLOPS. It has 11,000 compute nodes and 5.4375 petabytes of memory. It’s now the strongest laptop on the planet, and it’s right here to aid fabricate nukes.
On Monday, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory unveiled El Capitan, its most fashionable supercomputer, and announced that it had reached the peak of the TOP500 checklist, which benchmarks the world’s strongest laptop systems. It’s handiest the third supercomputer to reach exascale computing, meaning it can route of at least 1 quintillion floating level operations per 2nd (FLOPS).
The machine was built by the lab, along with Hewlett Packard Endeavor and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which can employ it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to make definite the agency doesn’t need to actually explode bombs to test them.
“This large accomplishment, years in the making and the outcomes of tireless efforts by tons of of dedicated workers in this large collaborative team, is a testament to the Laboratory’s leadership in utilizing 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 advanced challenges that were beforehand out of reach. We are proud to lead this achievement in partnership with enterprise, and advance science in ways that will revenue society and the nation as a total.”
El Capitan is more than 20 times as powerful as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s outdated supercomputer, Sierra, and can fabricate excessive-possibility 3D simulations that would have taken Sierra months in a matter of hours or days, the lab said in its press release. Its potential peak performance may probably upward thrust as excessive as 2.seventy nine exaFLOPS.
The outdated strongest laptop on the planet, called Frontier, is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and clocks in at 1.353 exaFLOPS. The third strongest, Aurora, is at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, in Illinois, and achieves 1.012 exaFLOPS. Both were also built by Hewlett-Packard Endeavor.
Processing 58.89 gigaFLOPS per watt of energy consumed, El Capitan is less energy environment friendly than Frontier, which began operating in 2022 and works at 62.68 gigaFLOPS per watt. Nonetheless, it’s more environment friendly than Aurora’s 26.15 gigaFLOPS per watt.
“El Capitan marks another significant milestone in exascale supercomputing, bringing monumental performance, energy effectivity and the capabilities to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery and make improbable breakthroughs to make stronger national security and free up new opportunities in renewable energy,” Trish Damkroger, a excessive-performance computing executive at Hewlett Packard Endeavor, said in a statement.
