El Capitan, the record-breaking supercomputer built by HPE and located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has officially claimed the title of the world's fastest supercomputer, according to the latest TOP500 rankings. The prestigious list, which tracks supercomputing milestones since 1993, underscores El Capitan's groundbreaking achievement.
“El Capitan marks another major milestone in exascale supercomputing, delivering monumental performance, energy efficiency, and the capabilities to accelerate AI-powered scientific discoveries and achieve incredible advances to strengthen national security and unlock new opportunities in renewable energy.” “, Trish Damkroger, senior vice president. said the president and CEO of HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions in a press release.
The Captain boosts government scientific research, including nuclear test simulations
The TOP500 team recorded El Capitan with a Linpack score of 1.742 EFlop/s, a standardized measure of how quickly the system can solve a complex sequence of linear equations.
The Captain supports the work of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, including research on nuclear weapons and deterrents. The lab also uses the machine for scientific research on energy security, climate change, power grid modernization and drug discovery.
The supercomputer uses fourth-generation AMD EPYC processors, Cray Slingshot 11 networking for data transfer, and a custom storage solution. The world's number one supercomputer has 11,039,616 combined CPU and GPU cores. It runs at a performance of 58.89 gigaflops per watt.
“The introduction of El Capitan continues the advancement of the capability needed to maintain our arsenal without a return to explosive nuclear testing,” Jill Hruby, undersecretary for nuclear security at the Department of Energy and administrator of the NNSA, said in a news release.
In May 2024, El Capitan appeared on the TOP500 list at number 46.
SEE: Dell offered new infrastructure for enterprise AI applications at the international supercomputing conference this week.
The 5 best supercomputers of 2024
Behind El Capitan, here are the most powerful computers in the world, according to the TOP500 list:
The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee
Frontier increased its exaflops to 1.353 Eflop/s on the November list, but that was still insufficient to prevent El Capitan from knocking Frontier off the top spot. Frontier uses 9,066,176 cores and Cray's Slingshot 11 network. It is used to study materials, energy, nuclear energy and genetics, among other scientific research.
The Aurora system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois
Aurora is based on HPE's Cray EX: Intel Exascale Compute blade with Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators. It maintained its benchmark score from earlier this year, at 1.012 Exaflop/s. The laboratory uses the supercomputer for scientific research, including climate, materials, fusion energy and energy storage.
The Microsoft Azure Eagle system
Eagle is a cloud-based supercomputer cluster offered through Microsoft Azure. Eagle uses 14,400 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids processors to achieve a benchmark score of 561.2 Pflop/s.
The HPC6 system at the Eni SpA center in Ferrera Erbognone, Italy
HPC6 joined the top five this year, contributing 477.90 PFlop/s from its headquarters at energy company Eni in Italy. HPC6 can now claim the title of Europe's fastest system. TOP500 notes that HPC6 uses the same architecture as Frontier.
AMD and Intel processors drive the top 10
TOP500 shows that AMD and Intel are the best options for the world's most powerful supercomputers. Five of the top 10 use AMD processors, while three use Intel. The remaining two use NVIDIA or a custom ARM-based processor. The Slingshot-11 interconnect appears to be the most popular choice for connectivity, used by seven in 10.
