All three top systems are HPE Cray supercomputers.
El Capitan has been crowned the world’s most powerful supercomputer on the bi-annual listing of the top 500 most powerful systems.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory system reached a record performance of 1.742 exaflops (HPL), overtaking previous champion Oak Ridge’s Frontier, which clocked 1.353 exaflops.
Coming in at number three is Aurora, Argonne’s Intel-based system that achieved 1.012 exaflops. All three top systems are HPE Cray supercomputers.
At number four is Eagle, Microsoft’s 561.2 petaflops supercomputer that is used by OpenAI to train frontier genAI models. The cloud company has other large supercomputer clusters, but does not submit them to the Top500.
Rounding out the top five is HPC6, another HPE Cray system, this time for Italian oil giant Eni. It achieved 477.9 petaflops.
At six is one-time record holder Fugaku, the Japanese supercomputer that uses Fujitsu’s Arm-based A64FX CPU. It hit 442.01 petaflops.
Then comes the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre’s 434.9 petaflops Alps system, Finland/EuroHPC’s 379.7 petaflops Lumi supercomputer, and Italy/EuroHPC’s 241.2 petaflops Leonardo supercomputer.
Finishing off the top ten is another new entrant – Tuolumne, a 208.10 petaflops supercomputer used by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, out of Lawrence Livermore.
Summit, which placed ninth on the previous edition of the Top500 list, was officially retired last week, making it ineligible for inclusion. Meanwhile, the last edition’s eighth place, MareNostrum 5 ACC, dropped to 11th place.
Similarly to Tuolumne, El Capitan will be used to run nuclear weapons simulations and other classified workloads.
It features some 44,544 AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing units, which co-packages 24 Zen 4 processor cores with six CDNA 3 compute dies, alongside 128GB of coherent HBM3 memory (for a total of 5.4 petabytes of HBM3). The system has 11,136 nodes, each boasting four MI300As.
The supercomputer consumes 29,580.98kW, and ranked 18th on the Green500 list of most efficient systems.
The JEDI – JUPITER Exascale Development Instrument at EuroHPC/FZJ in Germany topped that list, with 72.733 gigaflops per watt.
With the latest Top500, chip designer AMD now has more computers in the rankings than rival Nvidia.
The list is lacking in one core regard; however, China has declined to submit systems to the ranking for years. It has long been suspected of operating its own exascale systems, but El Capitan is now believed to be definitively more powerful.
