El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Garry McLeod/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The top spot in the league table of the world’s most powerful computers has changed hands, with one supercomputer built for US national security research overtaking another.
The Top500, a definitive list of the most powerful computers, is based on one metric: how fast a machine can solve large numbers of equations, measured in floating point operations per second (FLOPS). will be done. A machine called Frontier, built in 2022, was the first to be publicly acknowledged to have reached exascale (1 billion FLOPS).
Frontier was founded by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to not only perform nuclear weapons simulations, but also address a variety of complex scientific problems such as climate modeling, fusion simulations, and drug discovery. Ta.
Now, California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has developed El Capitan, which has a power of 1.742 exaFLOPS, more than any other supercomputer.
The machine was built under tight security in cooperation with the National Nuclear Security Administration, a division of the Department of Energy dedicated to developing nuclear weapons science. The agency was established in 2000 in response to revelations that nuclear secrets had been leaked from the Department of Energy to China.
Essentially, El Capitan would provide the vast computational power needed to ensure the effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without conducting any physical nuclear tests. LLNL claims that complex, high-resolution 3D simulations of nuclear explosions that previously took months on Sierra, its most powerful system, can be completed in just hours or days on El Capitan.
topic:
(tag to translate)computing
