World's fastest supercomputer 'El Capitan' goes online — it will be used to secure the US nuclear stockpile and in other classified research

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The world's most powerful supercomputer has been officially unveiled at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

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Studies will mainly concentrate on national security, encompassing material development, high-energy density physics, nuclear data, and weapon design, alongside other sensitive tasks.

Construction on the machine began in May 2023, and it went live in November 2024, with a formal dedication taking place on January 9.

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When it went operational last year, El Capitan achieved a score of 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. This is the measurement used to evaluate the computing speeds of supercomputers globally. At that time, El Capitan was just the third computer ever to reach exascale computing speeds. It is capable of a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS.

It typically provides several hundred billion floating-point operations per second - that's one trillion FLOPS. An exaFLOP is one quintillion FLOPS.

The subsequent quickest supercomputer globally is currently the Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Illinois. This supercomputer has reached a standard performance of 1.353 exaFLOPS with the capability of reaching a peak of 2.056 exaFLOPS.

Each system uses 128 gigabytes of high-speed memory, which is a special type of memory that delivers high performance while using less power, shared between the central processing unit and the graphics processing unit chiplets.

In the most recent Top500 list rankings.