El Capitan Leads 500 Supercomputer List

The 64th edition of the TOP500 list reveals that El Capitan has achieved the top spot and is officially the third system to reach exascale computing after Frontier and Aurora. Both systems have since moved down to No. 2 and No. 3 spots, respectively. Additionally, new systems have found their way onto the Top 10.

The new El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has debuted as the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.742 EFlop/s. It has 11,039,616 combined CPU and GPU cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. El Capitan relies on a Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 58.89 Gigaflops/watt. This power efficiency rating helped El Capitan achieve No. 18 on the GREEN500 list as well.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has moved down to the No. 2 spot. It has increased its HPL score from 1.206 Eflop/s on the last list to 1.353 Eflop/s on this list. Frontier has also increased its total core count, from 8,699,904 cores on the previous list to 9,066,176 cores on this list. It relies on Cray’s Slingshot 11 network for data transfer.

The Aurora system at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois has claimed the No. 3 spot on this TOP500 list. The machine kept its HPL benchmark score from the last list, achieving 1.012 Exaflop/s. Aurora is built by Intel based on the HPE Cray EX – Intel Exascale Compute blade which uses Intel Xeon CPU Max Series Processors and Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators that communicate through Cray’s Slingshot-11 network interconnect.

The Eagle system installed on the Microsoft Azure Cloud in the US claimed the No. 4 spot and remains the highest-ranked cloud-based system on the TOP500. It has an HPL score of 561.2 PFlop/s. The only other new system in the TOP 5 is the HPC6 system at No. 5. This machine is installed at Eni Center in Ferrera Erbognone, Italy, and has the same architecture as the No. 2 system Frontier. The HPC6 system at Eni achieved an HPL benchmark of 477.90 PFlop/s and is now the fastest system in Europe.