Today at SC24, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it delivered the fastest supercomputer, El Capitan, to the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) giving HPE the distinction of building the only three exascale systems in the world[i]. Running at 1.742 exaflops[ii] and achieving 58.89 gigaflops performance per watt[iii], the 100% fanless direct liquid-cooled El Capitan is also one of the top 20 most energy-efficient systems in the world.
“El Capitan marks another significant milestone in exascale supercomputing, bringing monumental performance, energy efficiency and the capabilities to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery and make incredible breakthroughs to strengthen national security and unlock new opportunities in renewable energy,” said Trish Damkroger, senior vice president and general manager, HPC & AI Infrastructure Solutions, HPE. “We are proud of this achievement, which resulted from a strong partnership and years-long research and development with the U.S. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and AMD. We look forward to future discoveries and engineering breakthroughs that El Capitan will enable.”
As the most powerful supercomputer in the world, El Capitan will allow the United States to maintain a competitive edge in national security and will enable the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Tri-Labs – LLNL, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory – to meet the increasingly demanding requirements for ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile and perform current and future stockpile modernization efforts. LLNL also intends to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) models for classified and unclassified workloads.
“We are pleased to have worked so successfully alongside our partners HPE and AMD over these last five years to deploy El Capitan,” said Rob Neely, Weapon Simulation and Computing Program Director, LLNL. “This long anticipated resource will allow us to perform the high-fidelity 3D modeling and simulation we need to effectively carry out our national security mission. We have a large team of people who have been getting applications ready to unleash the power of this system – many of them with the help of HPE in our Center of Excellence – and I can’t wait to demonstrate the capabilities to our sponsors and supporters. We are also committed to investing in AI on El Capitan and will be using the system for large-scale AI training and inference to make our calculations faster, more efficient, and potentially more accurate. Having a capability that is dialed in for both modeling and simulation and AI workloads, all in one system, is very exciting.”
El Capitan will also address secondary missions in maintaining national security, sch as nuclear nonproliferation and counterterrorism, and be used for material discovery, nuclear data and high energy density science, such as inertial confinement fusion research conducted at the National Ignition Facility. Insights gained from research performed on El Capitan will also feed into unclassified projects in the realm of energy security, climate change, power grid modernization, drug discovery and other areas.
The innovative platform enabling El Capitan’s performance is based on advanced technology anchored by HPE’s leadership-class supercomputing solution, HPE Cray EX equipped with the AMD Instinct™ MI300A APUs that integrate CPU cores and GPU cores with high-bandwidth memory into one package, the HPE Slingshot interconnect and a custom storage solution. HPE Slingshot, an ethernet-based high-speed fabric, serves as the backbone to El Capitan’s collective power, enabling large calculations to be performed across the system’s more than 11,000 nodes. As part of the public-private partnership, LLNL and HPE co-developed a custom near-node local storage solution to reduce latency that is dynamically configurable and tiered to a global Lustre-based file system shared across all compute nodes.
In addition to its impressive power, El Capitan was also designed to prioritize energy efficiency and leverages a high-density design made possible by HPE’s industry-first 100% fanless direct liquid cooling system architecture, featuring eight elements of cooling.
As the world leader in supercomputing[iv], HPE delivers an optimized end-to-end solution inclusive of software, storage and services that helps customers advance scientific innovation and discovery in the AI era.
