The world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, has been officially unveiled, boasting a peak performance of 2.7 exaflops and 1.7 exaflops of sustained performance. Built by AMD and HPE for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), it is powered by AMD Instinct MI300A APUs.
Tech editor Patrick Kennedy from ServeTheHome was invited to the launch event at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, where he captured exclusive photos of the system’s interior. The 128-rack supercomputer features liquid-cooled compute blades that produce minimal noise, with more noise coming from storage and other systems.
Kennedy observed that each rack contains 18 NVMe SSDs in a liquid-cooled unit called “Rabbit,” which is part of a 100,000+ GPU system planned for expansion. The El Capitan supercomputer’s size is comparable to other massive systems like Elon Musk’s xAI Colossus cluster, but at a fraction of the cost.
The system features AMD EPYC CPUs and liquid-cooled memory, with all components cooled by liquid instead of fans. This design choice allows for reduced noise levels while maintaining high performance. The National Nuclear Security Administration has built El Capitan to simulate nuclear weapons tests, solidifying its position as the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Source: https://www.techradar.com/pro/tech-editor-takes-close-snaps-of-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-and-lives-to-publish-them