The world's fastest supercomputer 'EL Captain'

The world’s fastest supercomputer ‘EL Captain’

Currently, the world’s most powerful and fastest supercomputer is ‘EL Captain’. It was designed and built by the US-based Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) company. It was launched in November 2024. This supercomputer immediately took the title of the world’s most powerful and fastest supercomputer. However, its system and equipment installation work began earlier, in May 2023.

This new generation supercomputer based on machine learning and artificial intelligence technology has been installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, USA.

Frontier was the world’s most powerful supercomputer since 2022. The new generation ‘EL Captain’ has surpassed this Frontier. It uses the Linux-based TOS (TOSS) operating system as its operating system.The speed of this supercomputing system is 2.7463 exaflops. Flops is a unit of computing power. Its full form is floating point operations per second. That is, how many decimal fractions can be calculated per second. Frontier’s speed was 1.5 exaflops. The new supercomputer EL Captain can now use this enormous computing power to accurately calculate about 2 quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeros) per second.The number of cores of this supercomputer is 11 million 39 thousand 616. It uses AMD optimized fourth generation 24C 1.8GHz processor. It has been designed and built at a cost of more than 600 million dollars.

This supercomputer requires 30-35 megawatts of power to operate, which is equivalent to the power supply of a small city.

According to the HP company’s website, EL Captain is about 16 times more powerful and faster than any other supercomputer in the world. EL Captain can calculate in just 1 second what 7.7 billion people—that is, all the people on earth together—would take 8 years to calculate. It is currently being used for scientific research and national security missions in the United States.

However, Japan has already announced the construction of an even larger supercomputer. While EL Captain’s speed is in the exaflops (1018), the speed of the Japanese-made Zeta-class will have to be calculated in zettaflops (1021).

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