El Capitan has officially been crowned the fastest supercomputer in the world. Commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program, El Capitan became fully operational last year and has since achieved a remarkable milestone. On January 9, it was officially dedicated, marking a new era in computing capabilities. Engineered to replace the Sierra supercomputer, El Capitan boasts an impressive score of 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, surpassing its predecessor and securing its place as a technological marvel.
The construction of El Capitan commenced in May 2023, and it came online in November 2024. With a staggering cost of $600 million, this supercomputer is engineered to handle various sensitive and classified tasks, including securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons. Equipped with 11 million processing and graphics cores embedded within 44,544 AMD MI300A accelerated processing units, each unit utilizes 128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory to achieve its unparalleled performance.
El Capitan is not only the fastest but also one of the most advanced supercomputers, reaching a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS. It is only the third computer globally to reach such exascale computing speeds. Measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), where one operation equates to a mathematical calculation, this performance places El Capitan at the forefront of computational excellence.
The Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory ranks as the next fastest supercomputer, trailing behind El Capitan. Despite its predecessor Sierra still holding the 14th position in the latest Top500 rankings, El Capitan's dedication signifies a transformative leap in computational power and capability.
