World's fastest supercomputer, "El Capitan," goes online to safeguard US nuclear weapons

[DragonSlayer101]

What just happened? The world's fastest supercomputer has gone online at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Called "El Capitan," the machine was unveiled earlier this month after around eight years of research and development. It will be used to secure the US nuclear stockpile and for classified research.

El Capitan can reach a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS, making it the National Nuclear Security Administration's first exascale supercomputer. It's the world's third exascale machine after the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the Aurora supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, also in Illinois.

The world's fastest supercomputer is powered by more than 11 million CPU and GPU cores integrated into 43,000+ AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. Each MI300A APU comprises an EPYC Genoa 24-core CPU clocked at 1.8GHz and a CDNA3 GPU integrated onto a single organic package, along with 128GB of HBM3 memory.

According to Pythagoras Watson, the team lead of the advanced technology system at LLNL, the system's peak performance is 2.79 quintillion calculations per second. As a measure of how astronomically large that number is, Watson explained to CBS News that if you went back in time 2.79 quintillion seconds, you'd arrive more than 70 billion years before the Big Bang.

Built at a cost of around $600 million, the world's newest supercomputer was primarily designed to safeguard and secure the US nuclear arsenal, but it will also perform other classified tasks related to national security, including AI and machine learning workloads. It will also solve problems in materials science and physics.

El Capitan was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of its CORAL-2 program to replace the Sierra supercomputer, which was deployed in 2018. While Sierra is still in service, El Capitan far exceeds its speed and efficacy with 18 times faster performance. As pointed out by Live Science, Sierra is still operational, and was recently ranked as the 14th most-powerful supercomputer globally.

El Capitan, which shares its name with the famous granite rock formation at Yosemite National Park, became fully operational last year, achieving a score of 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, which is used globally to judge supercomputing speeds. According to the LLNL, it would take a million smartphones working on a single calculation at the same time to match what El Capitan can do in one second.

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World's fastest supercomputer, "El Capitan," goes online to safeguard US nuclear weapons

 

[Xelions]

I'm happy Q will be round to stop Trump

 

[The Talking Tech]

Didn't these people watch Terminator???

Ai + Nuclear weapons = End of the Human Race.

 

[NumberNine]

How exactly does a supercomputer protect nuclear weapons? Does it deploy robots to shoot the people stealing them? Is it running the most advanced firewall known to man to protect port 3389 on the nuke launching Windows XP computers?

 

[Thrackerzod]

El Capitan is so outdated. They should really update to Sequoia.

 

[billc]

When are people going to realise that speed is really not that important. It's a simple matter to write a program that will take a million years to run, even on the fastest computer. Many things in computing are counterintuitive, such as the idea that things continue to improve with time. It just doesn't work like that, but don't tell that to Musk, Altman, or any of the other conmen.

 

[Underdog]

So this thing is fast, big deal.
I'd show more enthusiasm if they said they have made it unhackable.
It if was made by man, it can be defeated by man.

 

[toooooot]

When are people going to realise that speed is really not that important. It's a simple matter to write a program that will take a million years to run, even on the fastest computer. Many things in computing are counterintuitive, such as the idea that things continue to improve with time. It just doesn't work like that, but don't tell that to Musk, Altman, or any of the other conmen.

Sounds like oversimplification. Even what AI chatbots do would be unbelievable in 90s.
Things get better but at a giant cost. That cost that took humanity to get here where computers cost 600 million shows how hard progress is. I am not even amazed by complexity of our computes as I am about joint effort by millions of people who worked for decades and keep working as I write this.

 

[Mark Fuller]

I wonder how many people are already trying to hack into it.

 

[billc]

Sounds like oversimplification. Even what AI chatbots do would be unbelievable in 90s.
Things get better but at a giant cost. That cost that took humanity to get here where computers cost 600 million shows how hard progress is. I am not even amazed by complexity of our computes as I am about joint effort by millions of people who worked for decades and keep working as I write this.

And yet for all their efforts all they can produce third rate LLM's and cartoon pictures. Doesn't that tell you that it's just a con. Ask a LLM who invented the computer you are now using and it can't tell you. Check out von Neumann's The Computer and the Brain: the first part is a bit electronics, but then he explains in plain English and with basic maths, why it cannot emulate a brain.

 

[Str8Shot]

Didn't these people watch Terminator???

Ai + Nuclear weapons = End of the Human Race.

“THEY” didn’t just watch The Terminator, they wrote the script. Hollywood serves to inform us of what THEY plan to do in the near future. Consider all the movies of the past and how they’re now no longer fiction but reality. They tell us ahead of time what they’re going to do, and The Terminator is no exception, especially since James Cameron directed it…