El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore becomes world's fastest supercomputer, breaking 1.8 exaflops

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/El Capitan

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's El Capitan supercomputer became operational in November 2024, achieving 1.809 exaflops on the HPL benchmark to become the world's fastest supercomputer. Built by HPE and powered by AMD, El Capitan features over 11 million cores, 44,000+ MI300A accelerators, and 100% fanless direct liquid cooling.

• El Capitan's architecture combines AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs with Instinct MI300A GPUs, totaling 11,039,616 cores across the system.
• The system consumes 30 MW of power and achieves 58.9 gigaflops per watt, demonstrating energy efficiency at exascale.
• El Capitan is the third exascale supercomputer deployed by the U.S. Department of Energy, following Frontier at Oak Ridge and Aurora at Argonne.
• The system supports the NNSA Tri-Lab partnership (LLNL, Los Alamos, Sandia) for stockpile stewardship and scientific research.