El Capitan Tops Supercomputer Rankings, Powered by AMD Instinct Chips

In the fierce competition among the world's top supercomputers, a new leader—El Capitan—has ascended to the pinnacle of the TOP500 rankings with its outstanding performance. This supercomputer, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, is equipped with AMD Epyc processors and Instinct accelerators. Achieving a high-performance Linpack (HPL) score of 1.742 exaflops, it has overtaken Frontier, which also utilizes AMD Epyc processors, relegating Frontier to second place. The third position is secured by Aurora, powered by Intel Xeon CPU Max processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max accelerators.

El Capitan not only excels in performance but is also highly energy-efficient, ranking 18th on the GREEN500 list. This is an impressive feat for a top-tier supercomputer, showcasing remarkable efficiency. It can perform over 2 quintillion calculations per second, underscoring its formidable computational capabilities.

AMD has highlighted that El Capitan is the first exascale-level system within the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), providing robust computational power to LLNL, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories. Among the NNSA’s numerous projects and responsibilities, the certification and monitoring of aging nuclear weapons is a critical task. El Capitan’s capabilities significantly bolster this essential mission.

Rob Neely, Deputy Director of Weapons Simulation and Computing at LLNL, shared in the “Big Ideas Lab” the role of supercomputers in the certification and monitoring of nuclear weapons. He mentioned that prior to 1992, the United States conducted live nuclear tests to validate weapon performance. However, with the advancement of supercomputing, the U.S. has adopted the Scientific Base Storage Management tool, using supercomputers to simulate and validate weapon performance, thereby maintaining confidence in these weapons without the need for physical testing.

Notably, both El Capitan and the current second-place Frontier supercomputer utilize the Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transmission. Frontier, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, has improved its performance in the latest TOP500 list. However, its HPL score remains insufficient to retain the top spot. Frontier’s HPL score has increased from 1.206 Eflop/s to 1.353 Eflop/s, thanks to a significant expansion in core count, now totaling 9,066,176 cores.

Meanwhile, Aurora, which previously held the second position, has dropped to third place. This supercomputer, situated at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, delivers a performance of 1.012 Exaflop/s. Although it did not maintain its previous ranking, Aurora continues to exert considerable influence in the field of supercomputing.