The US has launched its new supercomputer, El Capitan, which is the planet’s third exascale computer and costs $600 million to build. The machine, reaching a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS, will handle sensitive tasks including securing the nuclear stockpile in the absence of underground testing. El Capitan was commissioned by the US Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program to replace the Sierra supercomputer and is expected to focus on national security research, including material discovery, high-energy-density physics, and nuclear data analysis.
Construction began in May 2023, and the machine became operational last year before being officially dedicated in January. El Capitan has a performance of 1.742 exaFLOPS, making it the third computer to reach exascale computing speeds. The next fastest supercomputer is currently at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Illinois, with a standard performance of 1.353 exaFLOPS.
El Capitan is powered by over 11 million processing and graphics cores and uses specialized memory for high-speed calculations. The US Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program aimed to replace the Sierra supercomputer, which remains in use and was the 14th most powerful supercomputer in recent rankings.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/worlds-fastest-supercomputer-el-capitan-goes-online-used-to-secure-the-u-s-nuclear-stockpile-and-other-classified-research