El Capitan: US breaks supercomputing barriers with new $600 million machine

The world's fastest supercomputer, "El Capitan," has officially been launched at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.

With a construction cost of $600 million, El Capitan is designed to perform a wide range of sensitive and classified tasks, including securing the US nuclear stockpile, in place of underground testing, which was banned in 1992, Caliber.Az reports referring to international media outlets.

The supercomputer will focus on national security research, including material discovery, high-energy-density physics, nuclear data, weapon design, and other classified operations.

Construction of El Capitan began in May 2023, and it became fully operational in November 2024 before its official dedication on January 9, 2025.

El Capitan achieved a groundbreaking performance of 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, earning it the title of the world’s fastest supercomputer. This makes it only the third computer ever to reach exascale speeds, with a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS. To put that into perspective, one exaFLOP is equivalent to 1 quintillion (10^18) floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), far surpassing the performance of typical laptops, which deliver several hundred gigaFLOPS (1 billion FLOPS).

The next fastest supercomputer, Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has a performance score of 1.353 exaFLOPS, with a peak of 2.056 exaFLOPS.

El Capitan is powered by over 11 million processing and graphics cores distributed across 44,544 AMD MI300A accelerated processing units, which combine AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs, AMD CDNA3 graphics, and memory. Each unit contains 128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, designed for fast performance while minimizing power consumption.

Commissioned by the US Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program, El Capitan replaces the Sierra supercomputer, which has been in use since 2018 and was ranked as the 14th most powerful supercomputer in the latest Top500 rankings.

By Tamilla Hasanova