The world’s most powerful supercomputer was officially dedicated in California yesterday, with the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and AMD on hand to celebrate their handiwork. El Capitan — as the $600 million supercomputer is known — will handle an array of classified tasks aimed at securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons and run a variety of other unspecified simulations. El Capitan and a smaller sibling designed for nonclassified work sit inside a large data center inside Lawrence Livermore National Labs, roughly 30 miles northeast of Silicon Valley. That smaller sibling, Tuolumne, is similar in design to El Capitan, but just one-tenth the size. It’s still powerful enough to rank 10th among the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Reporters yesterday were able to get a peek at the giant computer, which has been running test code since last year. While not solely designed for AI work, officials expect the two computers to make significant use of the emerging technology. “While we’re still exploring the full role AI will play, there’s no doubt that it is going to improve our ability to do research and development that we need,” said Bradley Wallin, a deputy director of the Livermore lab. El Capitan is capable of peak performance of 2.79 exaflops, or 2.79 quintillion calculations per second. That’s equivalent to the processing power of about 1 million of today’s high-end smartphones working simultaneously.

Full report : El Capitan, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, built by HPE and AMD as part of a $600M US DOE contract, is officially dedicated to handle classified tasks.

‘