El Capitan supercomputer with AMD Epyc is the new most powerful in the world

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in partnership with AMD, revealed that its newest supercomputer, El Capitan, debuts at the top of the list of the most powerful in the world. Equipped with Epyc processors, the new machine achieved 1.74 exaFLOPS in the Top500 test, passing the Frontier and securing the first two places for AMD systems.

The performance estimate for El Capitan can be “translated” to 1.742 quintillion operations per second. In addition to the Epyc processors, the number was achieved using 44,544 AMD Instinct MI300A cards, accompanied by 5.4 petabytes of memory.

The supercomputer’s Rpeak performance is also noteworthy, at 2.7 exaFLOPS. This is the estimate of El Capitan’s “maximum potential”, which could be achieved with each of its components operating at maximum capacity, with perfect scale. In other words, something impossible in the real world, but which shows room for the current number of practical performance to increase in future estimates.

The new supercomputer uses 4th generation AMD Epyc processors, each with 24 cores at 1.8GHz. It will be used by the US nuclear security agency, the NNSA, to simulate explosions and maintain the security of the country’s warhead stockpile. In addition, El Capitan will also serve to create two new intercontinental missile (ICBM) designs.

The Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers is updated every six months. It is at this time that organizations send new benchmarks of their systems to create the ranking, but this was not the case for Aurora.

The Aurora supercomputer uses Intel Xeon and was in second place on the list. Now he has gone to the third, but the data has not been updated for the last six months, because no new benchmarks have been sent.

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Tom’s Hardware reports that in the last Top500 update, Intel already mentioned that Aurora was not completely operational, due to several hardware problems, including cooling failures and operational errors. The lack of new benchmarks to compete with the latest Epyc supercomputer could be indicative that the issues have not yet been fixed.