LLNL, in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and AMD, have officially unveiled El Capitan as the world’s most powerful supercomputer and first exascale system dedicated to national security. Verified at 1.742 exaflops (1.742 quintillion calculations per second) on the High Performance Linpack — the standard benchmark used by the Top500 organization to evaluate supercomputing performance — El Capitan is the fastest computing system ever benchmarked. The system has a total peak performance of 2.79 exaflops. The Top500 list was released at the 2024 Supercomputing Conference in Atlanta.

• El Capitan verified as world’s fastest supercomputer. NNSA Tri-Lab scientists will utilize El Capitan’s speed and unparalleled capabilities to further advance NNSA’s core mission of maintaining an aging stockpile while simultaneously pursuing weapon modernization such as the W87-1 and W93 warheads currently under development. El Capitan also will support novel new AI-based workflows to address emerging challenges in the NNSA mission, including material discovery, design optimization, advanced manufacturing, digital twins and intelligent AI assistants trained on classified data.
• Big Ideas Lab introduces El Capitan, the world’s most powerful supercomputer: Go behind the scenes of the Lab’s latest groundbreaking achievement: El Capitan, the world’s most powerful supercomputer. In the episode, El Capitan experts explain the significance of the machine, and exascale computing, to the nuclear security enterprise and beyond. Key open source software tools mentioned in the episode include RAJA and Umpire.