El Capitan High Performance Computing | Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

High Performance Computing in Service of National Security

As the National Nuclear Security Administration’s first exascale supercomputer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) El Capitan has a peak performance of 2.79 quintillion (10¹⁸) calculations per second. El Capitan is currently the world's fastest supercomputer, benchmarked at 1.742 exaFLOPs. This unprecedented power contributes to LLNL, Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories’ efforts to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile without underground nuclear testing.

Along with stockpile stewardship, El Capitan supports work that provides the nation with a competitive edge in complex high-fidelity modeling and simulation as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning codes that can be applied to national security, materials discovery and inertial confinement fusion. El Capitan’s “sister” system Tuolumne — sited as part of the project — supports open science with applications to drug discovery, earth systems modeling and earthquake modeling.

2025 Gordon Bell Prize winners in front of the DOE/NNSA booth at SC25.

LLNL Honored at SC25 with HPCwire and Hyperion Research Awards for Computing Excellence

At the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis conference (SC25) in St. Louis, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) earned multiple top honors across exascale computing, open-source software and real-world scientific applications, receiving four 2025 HPCwire awards and a Hyperion Research HPC Innovation Excellence Award.

LLNL, UT & UCSD win Gordon Bell Prize with Exascale Tsunami Forecasting

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the University of Texas at Austin’s (UT) Oden Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) on Nov. 20 were awarded the prestigious 2025 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize for developing a real-time tsunami early-warning framework powered by the world’s fastest supercomputer, El Capitan.

The El Capitan supercomputer next to Tuolumne.

El Capitan Retains Title as World’s Fastest Supercomputer on Latest TOP500 List

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) El Capitan once again claimed the top spot on the TOP500 List of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, announced today at the 2025 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC25) conference in St. Louis.

Predictions across different biomolecular complexes by the preview release of OpenFold3, an open-source reproduction of AlphaFold3.

LLNL and Partners Launch Record-Breaking Protein-Folding Workflow on World’s Fastest Supercomputer

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and collaborators at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Columbia University have achieved a milestone in biological computing: completing the largest and fastest protein structure prediction workflow ever run, using the full power of El Capitan, the world’s fastest supercomputer.

LLNL Pushes Frontier of Fusion Target Design with AI

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have reached a milestone in combining AI with fusion target design by deploying AI agents on two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to automate and accelerate inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments.