Supercomputer, “El Capitan”, Goes Online

The world’s most efficient supercomputer, dubbed “El Capitan”, was recently unveiled at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, USA.

El Capitan – which became fully operational in November 2024 – cost $600 million to construct and is only the third machine of its kind in the world. It boasts a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS: exa- means quintillion and a single FLOP equates to a number with 18 digits so processing one quintillion floating point operations per second.

In other words, to achieve such computational power, you would need more than one million smartphones working simultaneously.

Commissioned by the US Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 programme, El Capitan was built to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile without the need for explosive testing, a practice banned since 1992. The machine will also support classified research in national security, materials science and physics.

El Capitan replaces the Sierra supercomputer, also housed at LLNL, which remains operational but ranks 14th globally. Its speed is nearly 18 times that of Sierra, enabling unparalleled advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning and other classified applications.

Livermore Mayor, John Marchand, lauded the achievement, saying: “This is a new era in computer science, and Livermore is leading the way now.”