El Capitan becomes the world’s most powerful supercomputer

El Capitan leads the TOP500, becoming the world’s most powerful supercomputer

With the latest update to the TOP500, El Capitan has made its debut, becoming the world’s most powerful supercomputer with an HPL score of 1.742 ExaFlops of computational performance. This is the third supercomputer to breach the ExaFLOP barrier, being the second AMD-based system to do so.

El Capitan is a system located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The system was initially intended to deliver over 2 ExaFLOPs of computational performance, signalling that this system may become faster as it is optimised. El Capitan is operated by the US Department of Energy (DoE) and is intended for military research and other applications.

In total, El Capitan has 11,136 nodes and brings together 44,544 AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. While raw performance is the main aim of this system, it is also the world’s 18th most efficient supercomputer in the GREEN500 list.

On the TOP500 list, AMD has become a dominant player. Today, three of its top five supercomputers are AMD-powered. Intel once dominated this list with Xeon-powered supercomputers. Now, AMD is the dominant player in the market with EPYC CPUs and Instinct GPUs.

If this supercomputer reaches its 2 ExaFLOP performance target, it will be more than 16 times more powerful than the IBM/Nvidia-based system it replaces.

Since the last publication of the TOP500, Frontier, which was the world’s fastest Supercomputer, has dropped to the #2 spot. Note that this computer has gotten faster since its last listing on the TOP500. The system has increased its HPL benchmark score from 1.206 ExaFLOPs to 1.354 ExaFLOPs. The system has also increased its core count from 8,699,904 cores to 9,066,176 cores.

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