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posted by janrinok on Friday November 22, @07:43PM   Printer-friendly

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 25, @05:21PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 25, @05:21PM (#1383296) Journal

    So I checked the Top 500 list.

    No Deep Thought.

    I used the Sublist generator. One of the dropdowns is "OS". So I tried the various choices "Linux", "Mac OS", "Windows", "Unix", "Free BSD", "BSD based", etc.

    All 500 appear to be running Linux. FWIW.

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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday November 25, @07:03PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Monday November 25, @07:03PM (#1383326)

    That's because it's a fictional computer from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reference to said fictional computer being what we might refer to as a "joke".

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    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday November 25, @10:38PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 25, @10:38PM (#1383345) Journal

      It should have been number 42 on the list.

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      Satin worshipers are obsessed with high thread counts because they have so many daemons.