'EL Captain' is an incredibly fast supercomputer!
Currently, the world's most powerful and exascale supercomputer is 'EL Captain'. It was originally designed and built by the American tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). It was fully unveiled in November 2024. Although its system and equipment installation began in stages from May 2023.
In fact, since 2022, the 'Frontier' with 2.06 exascale capacity has remained the world's most powerful supercomputing system. Currently, the new generation 'EL Captain' supercomputing system has emerged as the world's most powerful and fastest supercomputer. It uses Linux (TOS) OS as its operating system.
The speed of this supercomputing system is an incredible 2.79 or 2.7463 exaflops or 2,746.3 petaflops (FLOPS) or floating point operations per second (FLOPS) per second (Rpeak). It has achieved the milestone of more than 1 quintillion calculations per second with great precision. And a quintillion is calculated by placing 1 followed by 18 zeros (1,000,000,000,000,000,000).
This new generation supercomputer based on machine learning and artificial intelligence technology has been installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, USA. It is a high-level energy research and development center funded by the US federal government established in 1952.
The number of cores of this supercomputer, installed in 87 cabins on a 7,500 square foot space floor, is 11,039,616. It uses AMD Optimized Fourth Generation (EPYC) 24C 1.8GHz processors. It uses a total of about 145 kilometers of cable and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has spent a total of about 600 million dollars or more to build it.
The 'HPE Cray' model 'EL Captain' supercomputer was effectively launched in November 2024. It requires about 30 to 35 megawatts (peak hour) of electricity to operate. Which may be enough to power a small city. And this unimaginably high-speed innovation has already received a huge response from tech giant countries.
The Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company website states that EL Captain has been designed and built as a supercomputing system that is approximately 16 times more powerful and faster than any other supercomputer in the world. In addition, the calculation that would take an estimated 7.7 billion people about 8 years to complete, 'EL Captain' can complete it in just 1 second. However, this is nothing more than an estimate.
This supercomputer is currently being used for scientific research and US national security missions. It is operated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and is the first high-tech exa-scale supercomputer specifically for the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
References: Top500, HPE, New Scientist, Advanced Simulation and Computing, Wikipedia.
