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February 16, 2025
The supercomputer El Capitan, named after the imposing granite monolith in Yosemite National Park, commenced operations in the spring of 2025. With a computing power of 2.746 exaflops, it has taken the top spot in the global supercomputer rankings, significantly surpassing the exaflop mark. Housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, the supercomputer was funded with a budget of approximately 600 million US dollars by the US National Nuclear Security Administration.
The funding from the National Nuclear Security Administration already hints at the primary purpose of El Capitan. The LLNL confirms that the supercomputer will primarily be used to ensure the safety and reliability of the US nuclear weapons arsenal without resorting to underground testing, which has been banned since 1992.
Even the less secretive research areas that El Capitan is intended to support focus on US national security. These include research into new materials, the analysis of nuclear data, high-energy-density physics, and the development of conventional weapons.
Although El Capitan uses AI and machine learning for its calculations, the focus, according to LLNL, is not on the further development of AI capabilities or AI training itself. The emphasis is on the application of these technologies in the context of military research.
Besides El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, the three exascale systems, four European supercomputers are also in the top 10 of the world rankings. The fastest European supercomputer, the HPC6 at Eni in Italy, achieves a performance of 487 petaflops. However, it should be noted that China has not reported its most powerful systems for the ranking for some time. It is suspected that several exascale supercomputers already exist in China.
El Capitan already caused a stir in the summer of 2024 when the first expansion stage of the system, with only one-hundredth of its planned total performance, reached 46th place in the supercomputer ranking. In November 2024, El Capitan then catapulted to the top of the list, becoming the third supercomputer worldwide to break the exaflop mark.
The tasks of El Capitan can be divided into two main areas: the simulation of nuclear weapon tests and research in the field of national security. In the area of nuclear weapon simulations, the immense computing power of El Capitan allows the modeling of complex physical processes that occur during the detonation of nuclear weapons. This helps to verify and further develop the safety and reliability of the existing arsenal without resorting to real tests. In the area of national security, El Capitan supports research in various areas relevant to the defense capability of the USA. These include the development of new materials for weapons and defense systems, the analysis of nuclear data to improve the monitoring and understanding of nuclear threats, and research in the field of high-energy-density physics, which is relevant for the development of new energy sources and weapons technologies.
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