When Cray Computing, a supercomputer producer acquired by HP in 2019, that it could construct El Capitan it anticipated the pc to achieve a peak efficiency of 1.5 exaflops. At the moment, the sixty fourth version of the — a long-running rating of the world’s non-distributed supercomputers — was revealed, and El Capitan not solely exceeded that forecast by clocking 1.742 exaflops, however has claimed the title as essentially the most highly effective supercomputer on this planet proper now.
El Capitan is simply the third “exascale” laptop, which means it may possibly carry out greater than a quintillion calculations in a second. The opposite two, known as Frontier and Aurora, declare the second and third place slots on the TOP500 now. Unsurprisingly, all of those huge machines reside inside authorities analysis services: El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory; Argonne Nationwide Laboratory claims Aurora. Cray had a hand in all three programs.
El Capitan has greater than 11 million mixed CPU and GPU cores primarily based on AMD 4th-gen EPYC processors. These 24-core processors are rated at 1.8GHz every and have AMD Intuition M1300A APUs. It is also comparatively environment friendly, as such programs go, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt.
For those who’re questioning what El Capitan is constructed for, the reply is addressing nuclear stockpile security, however it will also be used for nuclear counterterrorism. Being extra highly effective than anticipated, it’s more likely to occupy the throne for a protracted whereas earlier than one other exascale laptop overtakes it.
