“El Capitan”, the supercomputer housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and designed to serve the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), won first place in the 64th biannual edition of the Top500, a ranking of the most powerful computers in the world. Not only did it beat the forecast of 1,742 exaflops, the performance measure for supercomputers that calculates at least one trillion operationsbut also ousted the Frontier, which falls into second place, joining Aurora, which reaches exascale.
Why is it number 1?
The Top500 global ranking is based on a single parameter: the speed with which a processor can solve a large number of equations, a measure referred to in computer jargon as flops (Floating point operations performed in one second). In 2022, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee developed Frontier, the first supercomputer officially recognized for reaching the speed limit of 1,300 exaflops. Their tasks include carrying out nuclear weapons simulations, analyzing complex scientific problems, modeling climate, simulating nuclear fusion and discovering new drugs.
El Capitan has proven to be faster than any other supercomputer and its first place in this year’s ranking indicates it: it is capable of reaching 1,742 exaflops. In essence, it provides enormous computing power needed to maintain the US nuclear deterrent without having to conduct physical atomic testing, enabling advanced simulations for the NNSA’s nuclear weapons management program. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory maintains that El Capitan performs the complex, high-resolution three-dimensional simulations of nuclear explosions in a matter of hours or days. Much faster than the months required by its Sierra predecessor.
Its system is composed of 11,039 combined central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) cores, thanks to the use of 44,544 AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. Each of these accelerators integrates 24 Zen 4 cores along with a graphics engine based on CDNA 3. The American laboratory declared that its maximum power is 2,746 exaflops, but in real tests a range of 1,742 exaflops was demonstrated, however, its performance is 45% higher than that of Frontier.
The European supercomputer
Also in the Top500 ranking is HPC6 (High Performance Computing) from the Italian energy company Eni. This machine offers a computing power of 606 petaflops, that is, more than 600 trillion complex mathematical operations per second. In addition to obtaining fifth position in the rankingHPC6 ranks as Europe’s first fastest supercomputerthe first in the world for industrial use, and the only non-American machinery in the top five places.
“Innovation and the constant evolution of technologies are essential to maintain and reinforce Eni’s leadership in the energy transition. IT advances allow us to use energy more efficiently, reducing emissions and promoting the development of new energy solutions” , explained Claudio Descalzi, CEO of Eni. The company claims that HPC6 uses an HPE Cray EX4000 system, which contains 3,472 computing nodes with a total of 13,888 GPUs. “Eni has developed a unique wealth of knowledge and technological programming that gives us a competitive advantage on the international stage and supports the speed of our transformation while driving our growth,” concludes Descalzi.
Article originally published in WIRED Italy. Adapted by Alondra Flores.
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