El Capitan High Performance Computing

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 is projected to be capable of more than two quintillion (10¹⁸) calculations per second at peak performance. 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 will be used to support 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 — will support open science and can be applied to challenges such as drug discovery, climate change and earthquake modeling.

El Capitan: Preparing for NNSA's First Exascale Machine

Continuing its tradition as a dominant Top500 high performance computing (HPC) site, LLNL began installing components in May 2023 for NNSA’s first exascale supercomputer, El Capitan. An exascale supercomputer can calculate at least one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000+) Double Precision (64-bit) operations per second (1 exaflop). El Capitan is projected to be the
world’s most powerful supercomputer, capable of performing more than 2 exaflops per second.

Workers installing components on the El Capitan supercomputer.

Livermore Computing: Road to El Capitan

The road to the NNSA’s first exascale-class supercomputer, El Capitan, began several years ago. This enormous undertaking of meticulous planning and strategic collaborations is already bearing fruit in a number of ways. Close coordination with the DOE Exascale Computing Project, Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research program and the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program has paved the way for secure integration of national security applications.