Technology
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The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNNL) in California is now home to the fastest supercomputer in the world. Dubbed El Capitan and officially dedicated on January 9, it’s only the third exascale supercomputer in the world, and by far the fastest.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.It cost $600 million to build and it will handle several extremely advanced tasks, including securing and monitoring the United States' stockpile of nuclear weapons. There are other research projects that fall under the broad umbrella of “national security” beyond nuclear data, such as new material discoveries, high-energy physics, and more classified tasks.
“El Capitan’s introduction continues the capability advancement needed to sustain our stockpile without returning to explosive nuclear testing. This computational capability, backed by decades of data, expertise and code development is the heart of science-based stockpile stewardship,” Jill Hruby, Department of Energy (DOE) undersecretary in the Biden Administration for nuclear security and National Nuclear Security Administration administrator, said in a 2024 statement. “We will continue to invest in the technological and scientific infrastructure necessary to underpin the nuclear security enterprise.”
The supercomputer began construction in May 2023 and came online in November 2024. It is capable of a peak performance of 2.746 exaflops. "Flop" stands for floating point operation per second, with a floating point operation being a multiplication or an addition. El Capitan can do up to 2.746 x 1018 flops and an average of 1.472 exaflops. For comparison, you would need over 1,000,000 iPhone 15 Pros working in unison to reach that computational power.
There are only other two supercomputers on the exascale, both in the United States. The Frontier supercomputer is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and has a peak of 2.056 exaflops and an average of 1.353 exaflops. The bronze medal goes to Aurora at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, with an average of 1.012 exaflops. Both of these facilities are operated by the Department of Energy.
“El Capitan will now allow scientists to have the ability to analyze what for most of us would be unimaginable complexities,” Livermore Mayor John Marchand said during the dedication event. “This is a new era in computer science, and Livermore is leading the way now.”
Exascale computing can provide incredible accuracy in a variety of applications such as weather forecasting, climate modeling, and medicine. Many countries and supranational entities like the European Union are building their own supercomputers, with investment and plans over the years. The government of the United Kingdom appeared to buck the trend by canceling investment in an £800 million exascale computer at the University of Edinburgh last summer.
LLNL Director Kim Budil openly celebrated the late President Jimmy Carter who passed away on December 29. Director Budil mentioned Carter's revolutionary contribution to the many fields in which exascale computers are being used. Carter also created the Department of Energy (DOE). Budil stated: “in some sense, we celebrate [Carter’s] legacy with El Capitan.”
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