The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced the official verification of El Capitan as the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
National Nuclear Security Administration
December 10, 2024
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On November 18, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) proudly announced the official verification of El Capitan as the world’s most powerful supercomputer, achieving a groundbreaking 1.742 exaFLOPS (1.742 quintillion floating-point operations or calculations per second). This achievement is the culmination of decades of innovation, strategic investment, and collaboration among NNSA and its Tri-Labs (LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and AMD.
El Capitan represents a key milestone in a journey that began nearly 30 years ago for the Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program, following the end of underground nuclear explosive testing in 1992. To ensure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, the Stockpile Stewardship Program was launched in 1995 to support U.S. national security missions through leading-edge scientific, engineering, and technical tools and expertise. The ASC program was established then and continues to be responsible for developing and delivering high-performance simulation and computing capabilities for the nuclear security enterprise.
Over the last 3 decades, NNSA and its laboratory partners have relentlessly pushed the boundaries of supercomputing to develop the tools and insights necessary for this mission. El Capitan, as the third exascale-class system deployed by the Department, embodies the latest evolution of this unparalleled expertise.
El Capitan’s record system performance was announced by the TOP500 organization at the 2024 Supercomputing Conference (SC24), the international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, using the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark—the standard measure for supercomputing performance. The HPL code solves a uniformly random system of linear equations and reports time and floating-point execution rate using a standard formula for operation count. El Capitan's No. 1 ranking underscores its exceptional computational power and significant contribution to high-performance computing.
“The El Capitan system achievement is a testament to the strong partnership between NNSA, HPE and AMD,” stated Thuc Hoang, Deputy Assistant Deputy Administrator for ASC. “The Tri-Lab computational scientists and engineers worked in tandem with HPE and AMD in the past 4 years to design and deliver a supercomputing system capable of addressing the nation’s nuclear security challenges. El Capitan’s advanced architecture will enable simulations of unprecedented resolution and precision, essential for evaluating the performance, safety, and reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons without nuclear explosive testing.”
El Capitan is more than just a technological triumph—it is a critical component of the NNSA’s commitment to maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent while upholding international arms control agreements. The journey of the El Capitan system highlights NNSA’s unwavering dedication to the high-performance computing effort. Decades of progress, from the early days of ASC’s first teraFLOP system to today’s exascale capabilities, reflect a steadfast commitment to pushing the frontiers of computational science. This new era of supercomputing not only bolsters NNSA’s stockpile stewardship mission but also paves the way for breakthroughs in science and engineering, reinforcing America’s global leadership in technological innovation.