The US nuclear stockpile will be managed by a $600 million supercomputer that's more powerful than the top 100 supercomputers combined

The El Capitan supercomputer, which will be built by Cray, is expected to be delivered to the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration in 2022.
El Capitan "will allow our scientists and engineers to get answers to critical questions about the nuclear stockpile faster and more accurately than ever before, improving our efficiency and productivity, and enhancing our ability to reach our mission and national security goals."
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The United States' nuclear stockpile will be managed by a $600 million supercomputer called "El Capitan" that's more powerful than the top 100 supercomputers in the world today combined.

Not to be confused with Apple's "El Capitan" version of its macOS computer operating system, the supercomputer will be built by American supercomputer manufacturer Cray, which announced the contract with the Department of Energy (DoE) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) on Tuesday.

"El Capitan will allow our scientists and engineers to get answers to critical questions about the nuclear stockpile faster and more accurately than ever before, improving our efficiency and productivity, and enhancing our ability to reach our mission and national security goals," Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) lab director Bill Goldstein said in a statement.

One of El Capitan's jobs will be to model 3D simulations of how nuclear weapons age, for which researchers have no nuclear test data, Cray said in its press release.

cray el capitan supercomputer Cray

"El Capitan's advanced capabilities for modeling, simulation, and artificial intelligence will help push America's competitive edge in energy and national security, allow us to ask tougher questions, solve greater challenges and develop better solutions for generations to come," said US Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty, DoE under secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA administrator, said in a statement that the NNSA is modernizing its systems to "face 21st-century threats."

El Capitan is an "exascale" class computer, which is to say it can compute over a quintillion calculations per second. A quintillion has 18 zeroes, and looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Specifically, El Capitan can compute 1.5 quintillion calculations per second, which can be translated to 1.5 exahertz. By comparison, ahigh-end consumer computer processor can calculate 5 billion calculations per second, or 5 megahertz per second. A billion has "only" nine zeroes compared to the 18 in a quintillion.

El Capitan will be the DoE's third exascale-class supercomputer, and will join Argonne National Laboratory's "Aurora" and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's "Frontier" systems. All three systems were built by Cray.

El Capitan is expected to be delivered to the DoE and NSSA in 2o22.

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The US nuclear stockpile will be managed by a $600 million supercomputer that's more powerful than the top 100 supercomputers combined

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