El Capitan has been declared the world's most powerful supercomputer in recent rankings by the TOP500 organization and is officially the third system to reach exascale computing in the U.S. after Frontier and Aurora.
Verified at 1.742 exaFLOPs (1.742 quintillion calculations per second) on the scale used by TOP500 to evaluate supercomputing performance — El Capitan is the fastest computing system ever benchmarked. The system comprises more than 11,000 compute nodes and provides U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with a flagship machine 22 times more powerful than its previous fastest supercomputer, Sierra.
The Frontier system at U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has moved down to the No. 2 spot, although it has increased its score from 1.206 Eflop/s to 1.353 Eflop/s and expanded its total core count from 8,699,904 cores to 9,066,176 cores.
The Aurora system at the U.S. Argonne Leadership Computing Facility claims the No. 3 spot, having maintained its benchmark score from the last list and achieving 1.012 Exaflop/s. The Eagle system installed on the Microsoft Azure Cloud in the U.S. earned the No. 4 spot and remains the highest-ranked cloud-based system on the TOP500 with a score of 561.2 PFlop/s.
New to the list in the No. 5 spot is the HPC6 system installed at Eni S.p.A center in Ferrera Erbognone, Italy, featuring the same architecture as the No. 2 system Frontier. The HPC6 system achieved a benchmark of 477.90 PFlop/s and is now the fastest system in Europe.
