On January 9, El Capitan went online. As of October 2023, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California has been preparing to introduce El Capitan, anticipated to become the world's most powerful supercomputer. The project represents an advancement in high-performance computing, marking a turning point in the field with an investment of approximately $600 million, according to IFLScience.
El Capitan is the result of the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore (CORAL-2) program promoted by the US Department of Energy (DOE). Designed to address national security missions, it will support research projects including material discovery, high-energy-density physics, nuclear data analysis, and weapon design.
Due to the ban on underground nuclear tests in the US since 1992, high-fidelity simulations are necessary to assess the reliability and safety of nuclear weapons. El Capitan aims to support these simulations.
El Capitan represents an evolution over its predecessor, the Sierra supercomputer, which has been operational since 2018. The US Department of Energy commissioned El Capitan to replace Sierra, which is currently ranked 14th on the Top500 list.
The supercomputer is expected to achieve a performance of 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with peak performance touching 2.746 exaFLOPS. One exaFLOP is equal to one quintillion (10^18) operations per second, and today's supercomputers exceed this scale, performing quintillions of operations per second, as Live Science explains.
El Capitan will be powered by a combination of 11 million processing and graphics cores, integrated into 44,544 AMD MI300A accelerated processing units. These units combine processors, graphics cards, and high-bandwidth memory. Each AMD MI300A unit uses 128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, which achieves high speeds while consuming less power.
The infrastructure of El Capitan is composed of 87 computer cabinets, or racks, specialized cabinets containing multiple interconnected servers and network components. The complete structure weighs about 590 tons, occupying an area of 6,000 square feet.
El Capitan will employ a 100% direct liquid cooling system without fans, essential for managing the heat generated by systems of this scale.
"Although we are still exploring the full role that AI will play, there is no doubt that it will enhance our ability to conduct the research and development we need," stated Bradley Wallin, deputy director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq