World’s new fastest supercomputer is built to simulate nuclear bombs | New Scientist
The vast computational power of the El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California will be used to support the US nuclear deterrent
By: Matthew Sparkes for the New Scientist
The top spot in the league table of the world’s most powerful computers has changed hands, with one supercomputer built for US national security research ousting another.
Top500, the definitive list of the most capable computers, is based on a single metric: how fast a machine can solve vast numbers of equations, measured in floating-point operations per second, or FLOPS. A machine called Frontier built in 2022 was the first publicly acknowledged to have reached the exascale – a billion billion FLOPS. Frontier was created by Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee to work on a range of complex scientific problems including climate modelling, nuclear fusion simulation, drug discovery and national security applications.
