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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: 3, Insightful) by turgid on Saturday November 23, @12:07PM (1 child)
Ah, yes, the safety of it being a credible deterrent, i.e. it'll go off properly when used.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Saturday November 23, @12:46PM
That is the number one use of nuclear weapons. While a certain amount of uncertainty is probably a good thing (to dial back strategies of brinkmanship), too much generates all kinds of risks. For example, use it or lose it, or starting up real nuclear tests. To add to the latter, I wouldn't be surprised if Russia starts up nuclear tests at some point in the near future because their military has serious corruption and quality control issues that probably have leaked into their nuclear weapons readiness.