Lawrence livermore national laboratory

HPE to build the first exascale supercomputer for the US Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

El Capitan

US Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announce partnership with Cray to develop NNSA’s first exascale supercomputer.

WHAT’S HAPPENING

Cray Wins NNSA-Livermore “El Capitan” Exascale Contract

13 August 2019 Cray has won the bid to build the first exascale supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

WHAT’S HAPPENING

Cray Wins NNSA-Livermore “El Capitan” Exascale Contract

13 August 2019 Cray has won the bid to build the first exascale supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

30 September 2020

Exascale Day celebrates supercomputing industry and its achievements

DOE/NNSA, Lab announce partnership with Cray to develop NNSA's first exascale supercomputer

‘El Capitan’ at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will perform mission critical research to maintain U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile

A supercomputer for every data centre

HPE and AMD power complex scientific discovery in world’s fastest supercomputer for U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)

“The Department of Energy is the world leader in supercomputing and El Capitan is a critical addition to our next-generation systems. El Capitan’s advanced capabilities for modeling, simulation and artificial intelligence will help push America’s competitive edge in energy and national security, allow us to ask tougher questions, solve greater challenges and develop better solutions for generations to come.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry
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“We are proud to partner with Cray in the coming years to usher in the era of exascale computing at LLNL, beginning the next chapter in the long, storied history we have at this Laboratory in leading-edge supercomputing. El Capitan will allow our scientists and engineers to get answers to critical questions about the nuclear stockpile faster and more accurately than ever before, improving our efficiency and productivity, and enhancing our ability to reach our mission and national security goals.”

Lab Director Bill Goldstein
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“We are honoured to be a part of this historic moment to deliver the next U.S. exascale supercomputing system to the DOE, NNSA and LLNL in support of their incredibly important mission. We couldn’t be more excited that Cray’s Shasta systems, software and Slingshot interconnect will be the foundation for the first three U.S. exascale systems. El Capitan will incorporate foundational new software technologies from Cray that are critical for the exascale era where digital transformation and the convergence of modelling simulation, analytics and AI are driving new, data- intensive workloads at extreme scale.”

Pete Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray
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2

Quintillion calculations per second

Just how fast is 2 quintillion? It's fast fast-18 zeros fast! 2,000,000,000,000,000,000
2

2 quintillion =

2 exaflops = 2,000 petaflops
(2,000,000,000,000,000,000)
7.7

Billion

If all 7.7 billion people on Earth each completed one calculation per second, it would take over 8 years to do what El Capitan will be capable of doing in 1 second.

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Charting the exascale transformation from national lab to small enterprise

Pete Ungaro HPE General Manager, High Performance Computing (HPC) and Mission Critical Solutions (MCS) introduces the U.S. Department of Energy’s El Capitan supercomputer and discusses how the technology that makes this one of the world’s fastest will be crucial to organisations of every size and type.

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Exascale computing by the numbers

Exascale computing enables discovery and innovation that will profoundly change how we live and work. Here are some resources and stats to get you started.

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