Supercomputers are currently a really important part of technological research, they are computer systems that manage to allow a large number of advances because they are capable of offering extremely high power, which translates into many billions of operations per second. With the arrival of the new technologies We were waiting to see who would end up taking first place as the most powerful computer in the world, and this time we can see a new name, since it is not an updated system that tops the list of the computers further powerful of the world, but a new one.
Managing to surpass the power offered by a supercomputer that belongs to the list of the most powerful in the world is somewhat complicated, not only due to the fact that they have extremely high specifications that they are capable of improving, but also due to other problems such as limitations. physical or monetary. These models represent an extremely large investment, something that means that the list itself is not updated with new computers too frequently, so the fact that a new model manages to reach first place is something that no one expects.
The Captain lives up to his name and leads the first place on the list
Managing to surpass the performance offered by a supercomputer is somewhat complicated, for this reason it is always the same computers that are among the TOP 10 most powerful in the world, since they do not usually change much from one year to the next. In general we can find how there are systems from almost ten years ago within this list, but the advances that we have been able to see in recent years demonstrate the capacity they have to evolve, since a new computer has managed to take first place by surpassing by far the score of its competitors.
This system is located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and has debuted as the most powerful system by managing to offer an HPL score of 1,742 PFlop/s, a score much higher than what we can find in other models. To understand it, we can see that what was until now the most powerful supercomputer in the world “Frontier” managed to reach a total of 1,353 PFlop/s, that is to say that El Capitan manages to have an increase in performance almost 30% higher compared to with which he was the leader of this list until recently.
El Capitan is powered by a total of 11,039,616 CPUs and GPUs combined, based on the fourth generation of 24-core 1.8 GHz EPYC processors coupled with AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. The second most powerful computer that we mentioned before, the Frontier, has about 2 million fewer cores, since it has a total of 9,066,176 cores, while those behind these two beasts on the list have much fewer, since we only have to see the score they manage to obtain, since they go directly to having 1000 or less than 600 PFlop/s.
