LLNL wins 2019 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards for El Capitan

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), along with the Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories and Cray Inc., garnered HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards for Top Supercomputing Achievement for 2019. The awards recognize the announcements earlier this year of the Department of Energy’s first three exascale-class machines: Aurora, Frontier and El Capitan. All three supercomputers will be built by Cray utilizing their Shasta architecture, Slingshot interconnect and new software platform. 

HPCwire publisher Tom Tabor presented the award to LLNL on Wednesday at the 2019 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC19) in Denver in honor of the contract struck with Cray to build LLNL’s El Capitan, the first exascale-class supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

El Capitan is expected to have a peak performance of more than 1.5 exaflops (1.5 quintillion calculations per second) and will be delivered in late 2022. Featuring advanced capabilities for modeling, simulation and artificial intelligence (AI), El Capitan is projected to be 10 times faster on average than LLNL’s 125-petaflop Sierra system, currently the world’s second most powerful supercomputer. El Capitan is expected to go into production by late 2023, servicing the needs of NNSA’s Tri-Labs: LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.

“The enormous processing power of this system will open the door to routine 3D assessments of complex systems critical to the successful execution of the NNSA workload mid-decade,” said LLNL ASC Program Director Michel McCoy. The partnership within the Exascale Computing Initiative and multiple labs across Office of Science and NNSA, and in particular with the Argonne and ORNL, has been hugely important in achieving this goal and demonstrates what is possible when we all work together.”

The annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community and are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, according to HPCwire.

 “Every year it is our pleasure to connect with and honor the HPC community through our Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, and 2019 marked an exceptional showing of industry innovation,” said Tabor, CEO of Tabor Communications. “Between our worldwide readership of HPC experts and an unparalleled panel of editors, the Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards represent resounding recognition throughout the industry. Our congratulations go out to all of the winners.”

Visit HPCwire for more information and a full list of the 2019 HPCwire awards.