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The fastest supercomputer in the world has formally plunge at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ( LNNL ) in California .
The supercomputer , called " El Capitan , " cost $ 600 million to build and will handle various sensitive and classified tasks admit secure the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons in the absence of underground examination , accord toLNNL representative . This wasprohibited in 1992 .
El Capitan will handle various sensitive and classified tasks including securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons in the absence of underground testing.
inquiry will in the main be focused on home security , include material find , in high spirits - energy - compactness physics , nuclear data point and weapon system design , as well as other classified tasks .
Construction on the machine began in May 2023 , and it descend online in November 2024 , before being formally dedicated on Jan. 9 .
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El Capitan became theworld ’s fast computerwhen it became fully usable last twelvemonth with a account of 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High - Performance Linpack ( HPL ) bench mark . This is a test used to judge supercomputing speeds all over the existence . This make El Capitan only the third computer ever to reach exascale cipher speeds . It has a peak functioning of 2.746 exaFLOPS .
carrying out is measured in floating - dot operations per 2nd ( FLOPS ) , where one floating - compass point operation is a mathematical calculation . Although like - for - like comparisons are tricky , thebest laptopsusually deliver several hundred gigaFLOPS of power — that ’s 1 trillion ( 10 ^ 9 ) FLOPS . An exaFLOP is 1 quintillion ( 10 ^ 18 ) FLOPS .
The next fastest supercomputer in the world is presently the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee . That supercomputer has accomplish a standard performance of 1.353 exaFLOPS with a eyeshade of 2.056 exaFLOPS .
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El Capitan is powered by just over 11 million processing and art marrow packed into 44,544 AMD MI300A accelerated processing units — chips that combine AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs , AMD CDNA3 graphics cards and calculate memory — grant toNext chopine . Each use 128 gigabytes of mellow - bandwidth memory — a peculiar type of computing retentiveness that achieves eminent fastness while take in less index — shared across central processing unit and graphics processing unit chiplets .
El Capitan was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy’sCORAL-2 programto exchange the Sierra supercomputer , deployed in 2018 . This supercomputer is still in use and was the14th most muscular supercomputerin the latest Top500 rankings .
