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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
When Cray Computing, a supercomputer manufacturer acquired by HP in 2019, announced that it would build El Capitan it expected the computer to reach a peak performance of 1.5 exaflops. Today, the 64th edition of the TOP500 — a long-running ranking of the world's non-distributed supercomputers — was published, and El Capitan not only exceeded that forecast by clocking 1.742 exaflops, but has claimed the title as the most powerful supercomputer in the world right now.
El Capitan is only the third “exascale” computer, meaning it can perform more than a quintillion calculations in a second. The other two, called Frontier and Aurora, claim the second and third place slots on the TOP500 now. Unsurprisingly, all of these massive machines live within government research facilities: El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Frontier is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory claims Aurora. Cray had a hand in all three systems.
El Capitan has more than 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th-gen EPYC processors. These 24-core processors are rated at 1.8GHz each and have AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. It's also relatively efficient, as such systems go, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt.
If you’re wondering what El Capitan is built for, the answer is addressing nuclear stockpile safety, but it can also be used for nuclear counterterrorism. Being more powerful than anticipated, it’s likely to occupy the throne for a long while before another exascale computer overtakes it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by dwilson98052 on Friday November 22, @10:08PM (1 child)
They also purchased SGI... not Silicon Graphics, but rather what was left of them after Rackable Systems purchased them and handed the money and the reigns to the same idiots that ran Silicon Graphics into bankruptcy in the first place... all so the CEO at the time could put a notch on his belt and say he saved SGI.
Source: I was there............
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Friday November 22, @10:12PM
Never, ever "believe in" or form a loyalty to a company. Nowadays, companies exist purely as vehicles to move money from customers to investors occasionally by employees, which are a necessary overhead to be ruthlessly controlled.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].