World’s fastest supercomputer is in the Bay Area

LIVERMORE, Calif. – The world’s fastest supercomputer is in the Bay Area at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

El Capitan, which officials at the federal lab said can perform 1.742 quintillion calculations per second, was verified as the world’s most powerful supercomputer during the 2024 Supercomputing Conference being held this week in Atlanta. A quintillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, or a billion billion.

The so-called exascale supercomputer was developed in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise “global edge-to-cloud company” and the AMD server CPU company.

Lawrence Livermore lab officials said in a statement that the tech’s purpose is “to advance nuclear weapon science and scientific discovery, providing the vast computational power necessary to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing.”

El Capitan will be a resource to the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories along with Lawrence Livermore, which is located on the east end of the city of Livermore.

Lab officials said in the statement that the machine will be used to “further advance NNSA’s core mission of maintaining an aging stockpile” of nuclear weapons while “simultaneously pursuing weapon modernization” of warheads currently under development.

Among the planned uses for El Capitan is “to model advanced high-energy-density physics experiments” like the “detailed understanding of material behavior under extreme conditions.”

Lawrence Livermore lab director Kim Budil said, “El Capitan’s extraordinary computing capabilities will allow us to tackle complex challenges that were previously out of reach. We are proud to lead this achievement in partnership with industry, and advance society in ways that will benefit society and the nation as a whole.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise officials said in their own news release about El Capitan this week that its AI-driven scientific research “will support national security efforts and will accelerate both classified and unclassified studies on energy security, climate change, power grid modernization, drug discovery and other areas.”

More information about the El Capitan system can be found at https://www.llnl.gov/news/highlights/el-capitan-high-performance-computing.