Officials with the U.S. government were in the East Bay on Thursday to dedicate "El Capitan," the fastest supercomputer in the world.
The supercomputer housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was assembled by HP using AMD chips and takes up 7,500 square feet. The massive supercomputer generates so much heat, it requires 28,000 tons of cooling via liquid. For comparison, the typical home requires only 4 to 5 tons of air conditioning.
El Capitan can perform 1.7 quintillion math problems per second -- that's the number 17 with 17 zeroes after it.
Since the United States no longer conducts live nuclear bomb tests, the primary mission of El Capitan is to ensure the safety and security of our country's aging nuclear stockpile by running three dimensional high resolution simulations instead.
"Its purpose really is for national security," said Terri Quinn, deputy associate director for High-Performance Computing at the Livermore lab. "So we’ve got an enduring nuclear stockpile that’s aging. And modeling and simulation is absolutely essential to maintaining that. And there’s new designs of weapons systems coming along that need to be validated and designed and tested all on a computer because we don’t do nuclear testing anymore."
El Capitan is about 20 times faster than the lab's previous supercomputer Sierra dedicated in 2018. What took days or weeks on Sierra now can be done just hours on El Capitan.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said it expects to see hardware failures in El Capitan after about five years. Software upgrades will also be harder to come by then, which is why now they are already designing the next supercomputer to succeed El Capitan.
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