All told, El Capitan will be 16 times more powerful than the system it replaces. LLNL will be using the system to replace Sierra, their current IBM Power 9 + NVIDIA Volta supercomputer.

Like the similar Frontier system, El Capitan comes with a $600 million price tag and is intended to ensure the US’s leadership in supercomputers in the exascale era. Overall, El Capitan is the second ( and apparently final) system being built as part of the US DOE’s CORAL-2 program for supercomputers. However thanks to some late configuration changes, the DOE now expects the system to reach 2 exaflops once it’s fully installed, which would cement its place at the top of the US’s supercomputer inventory. Already expected to be the fastest of the US’s exascale systems, El Capitan was originally commissioned as a 1.5 exaflop system seven months ago. This afternoon the DOE and HPE are announcing the architectural details of the supercomputer, revealing that AMD will be providing both the CPUs and accelerators (GPUs), as well as revising the performance estimate for the supercomputer. At the time the system was announced, The DOE and LLNL confirmed that they would be buying a Shasta system from Cray (now part of HPE), however the announcement at the time didn’t go into any detail about what hardware would actually be filling one of Cray’s very flexible supercomputers.īut as of today, the wait is over. Scheduled to be installed in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in early 2023, the system is intended primarily (but not exclusively) for use by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), who uses supercomputers in their ongoing nuclear weapons modeling. Back in August, the United States Department of Energy and Cray announced plans for a third United States exascale supercomputer, El Capitan.

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