‘El Capitan,’ The World’s Fastest Supercomputer, Goes Live in California

A new supercomputer called El Capitan has been launched at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This machine, costing a whopping $600 million, will play a key role in securing sensitive tasks, particularly around U.S. nuclear weapons. With underground testing no longer allowed since 1992, El Capitan will help maintain the nation’s stockpile.

El Capitan isn’t just any supercomputer. It’s now the fastest in the world. It hit 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack benchmark, making it the third computer to ever reach exascale computing speeds.

For reference, an exaFLOP is 1 quintillion (10^18) calculations per second, a major leap from regular laptops, which perform at a few hundred gigaFLOPS.

In terms of raw power, El Capitan can peak at 2.746 exaFLOPS. For comparison, Frontier, the second-fastest supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reaches 2.056 exaFLOPS.

The supercomputer’s job will mainly involve national security and high-energy physics research. It will help in material discovery, nuclear data, and weapon design, as well as other top-secret projects.

Construction began in May 2023, and by November 2024, El Capitan was up and running. It became fully operational shortly before its dedication on January 9, 2025.

Inside, El Capitan is powered by over 11 million cores, including both processing and graphics cores. The system uses 44,544 AMD MI300A units, which combine high-performance CPUs and GPUs along with 128GB of high-bandwidth memory for faster computations with lower power usage.

This supercomputer was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program to replace the Sierra supercomputer, which has been in service since 2018.

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