AMD-powered El Capitan is now the world's fastest supercomputer with 1.7 exaflops of performance — fastest Intel machine falls to third place on Top500 list

AMD and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced today that the AMD-powered El Capitan has taken the top spot on the semi-annual Top500 list as the fastest-known supercomputer on the planet with 1.742 exaflops of performance. El Capitan debuts on the list at the top spot, catapulting over the previous leader, the 1.3 exaflop Frontier. The Intel-powered Aurora system fell to third place on the list—the system didn't submit a new benchmark run, implying that the partially operational system is still experiencing failure issues on numerous fronts (more below).

The sheer scale of El Capitan is mind-boggling — the system has 11,136 nodes packed with 44,544 of AMD's MI300A APUs, 5.4 petabytes of main memory, and an exceptionally performant 'Rabbit' near-node storage subsystem (more on those details below). El Capitan achieved 1.742 quintillion operations per second (exaflops) of performance in the benchmark, equivalent to doing one calculation every second for 54 billion years—but El Capitan does that amount of work every second. That's 45% faster than the second-fastest system on the list. 

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will use the system to modernize the US nuclear arsenal by simulating explosions to eliminate the need for underground detonations and simulate aging effects, safety, and reliability of the nuclear stockpile. The system will also be used to develop two new ICBM designs. The system will be used for HPC and AI workloads, or a fusion of the two.

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