Uploaded January 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Hundreds of current and former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) employees, government officials and industry leaders gathered at LLNL on Jan. 9, 2025 to mark a monumental achievement: the dedication of El Capitan, the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Celebrating the deployment and acceptance of the first exascale system built for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the event marked a historic milestone in scientific computing and national security, highlighting the collaborative, public-private effort.
Capable of performing over 2 quintillion calculations per second (2.79 exaFLOPs peak), El Capitan is the pinnacle of high-performance computing (HPC) and the flagship system for the NNSA Tri-Labs (LLNL, and Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories). Built in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and AMD, El Capitan and its unclassified companion system Tuolumne — the world’s tenth most powerful computer as of Jan. 2025 — integrate cutting-edge technologies like AMD’s MI300A Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and HPE’s Slingshot interconnect.
El Capitan and its capability to run complex 3D modeling and simulation at high resolution will play a critical role in ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without underground testing, as well as advance material discovery, high energy density physics, inertial confinement fusion and other national security-related missions. Meanwhile, Tuolumne will support a wide range of research initiatives through LLNL’s Multi programmatic and Institutional Computing program, including drug discovery, developing simulations of quantum systems, advanced manufacturing processes, space science and earthquake modeling.
LLNL-VIDEO-2002075
Hundreds of current and former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) employees, government officials and industry leaders gathered at LLNL on Jan. 9, 2025 to mark a monumental achievement: the dedication of El Capitan, the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Celebrating the deployment and acceptance of the first exascale system built for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the event marked a historic milestone in scientific computing and national security, highlighting the collaborative, public-private effort.
Capable of performing over 2 quintillion calculations per second (2.79 exaFLOPs peak), El Capitan is the pinnacle of high-performance computing (HPC) and the flagship system for the NNSA Tri-Labs (LLNL, and Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories). Built in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and AMD, El Capitan and its unclassified companion system Tuolumne — the world’s tenth most powerful computer as of Jan. 2025 — integrate cutting-edge technologies like AMD’s MI300A Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and HPE’s Slingshot interconnect.
El Capitan and its capability to run complex 3D modeling and simulation at high resolution will play a critical role in ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without underground testing, as well as advance material discovery, high energy density physics, inertial confinement fusion and other national security-related missions. Meanwhile, Tuolumne will support a wide range of research initiatives through LLNL’s Multi programmatic and Institutional Computing program, including drug discovery, developing simulations of quantum systems, advanced manufacturing processes, space science and earthquake modeling.
LLNL-VIDEO-2002075
