In 1965, the US and different nuclear powers dedicated to the Complete Nuclear-Check-Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear exams. The Nationwide Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA), a successor to the Manhattan Mission, now exams nukes solely in simulation. To that finish, the NNSA yesterday unveiled the world’s quickest supercomputer to air in its mission to take care of a secure, safe, and dependable nuclear stockpile.
El Capitan was introduced yesterday on the SC Convention for supercomputing in Atlanta, Georgia, and it debuted at #1 within the latest Top500 checklist, a twice-yearly rating of the world’s highest performing supercomputers. El Capitan, housed at Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., can carry out over 2700 quadrillion operations per second at its peak. The earlier document holder, Frontier, may do exactly over 2000 quadrillion peak operations per second.
Alongside El Capitan, the NNSA introduced its unclassified cousin, Toulumne, which debuted at #10 on the Top500 checklist and might carry out a peak of 288 quadrillion operations per second.
The NNSA—which oversees Lawrence Livermore in addition to Los Alamos Nationwide Laboratory and Sandia Nationwide Laboratories—plans to make use of El Capitan to “mannequin and predict nuclear weapon efficiency, growing older results, and security,” says Corey Hinderstein, performing principal deputy administrator at NNSA. Hinderstein says the 3D modeling of a number of physics processes might be considerably enhanced by the brand new supercomputer’s velocity. The crew additionally plans to make use of El Capitan to assist in its inertial confinement fusion efforts, in addition to to coach synthetic intelligence in assist of each of these efforts.
Planning for El Capitan started in 2018, and building has been ongoing for the previous 4 years. The system is constructed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which has constructed all the present prime 3 supercomputers on the Top500 checklist. El Capitan makes use of AMD’s MI300a chip, dubbed an accelerated processing unit, which mixes a CPU and GPU in a single package deal. In whole, the system boasts 44,544 MI300As, related collectively by HPE’s Slingshot interconnects.
El Capitan makes use of 44,544 of AMD’s MI300A chips, which mix a CPU and GPU in a single package deal.Garry McLeod/Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory
Scientists are already at work porting their code over to the brand new machine, and they’re keen about its promise. “We’re seeing important velocity ups in comparison with working on previous chips versus this new factor,” says Luc Peterson, computational physicist at Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory. “We’re on the level the place our time to science is shrinking. We will do issues in a couple of days that might have taken a couple of months. So we’re fairly excited in regards to the purposes.”
But the urge for food for ever bigger supercomputers lives on. “We’re already engaged on the subsequent [high performance computing] acquisition,” says Thuc Hoang, director of the superior simulation and computing program at NNSA.
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