The world’s most powerful supercomputer, El Capitan, has been officially launched at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. Built at a cost of $600 million, the system has been designed to manage highly classified national security tasks. The primary objective of the supercomputer is to ensure the security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the absence of underground testing, which has been prohibited since 1992. Research in high-energy-density physics, material discovery, nuclear data analysis, and weapons design will be conducted, along with other classified operations.

Performance and Capabilities

According to reports, El Capitan became the fastest supercomputer globally after achieving 1.742 exaFLOPS in the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. The system has a peak performance of 2.746 exaFLOPS, making it the third machine ever to reach exascale computing speeds. The measurement, taken in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS), represents the ability of the supercomputer to perform one quintillion (10^18) calculations per second.

As reported by space.com, the second-fastest supercomputer, Frontier, located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Illinois, has recorded a standard performance of 1.353 exaFLOPS, with a peak of 2.056 exaFLOPS. El Capitan’s significant advancement marks a leap in computational capabilities within high-performance computing.

Technical Specifications

As reported by The Next Platform, El Capitan is powered by over 11 million processing and graphics cores distributed across 44,544 AMD MI300A accelerated processing units. These units incorporate AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs, AMD CDNA3 GPUs, and shared computing memory. Each processing unit includes 128 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, designed to optimise computational efficiency while minimising power consumption.

Development and Commissioning

Reports indicate that construction of El Capitan began in May 2023, with the system going online in November 2024. The official dedication took place on January 9, 2025. The supercomputer was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy’s CORAL-2 program as a successor to the Sierra supercomputer, which was deployed in 2018 and currently ranks 14th in the latest Top500 list of most powerful supercomputers.

With El Capitan’s full-scale deployment, advancements in national security research and computational science are expected to reach unprecedented levels.

A member of the Bank of England’s rate-setting committee has made a case for a steeper cut to interest rates on expectations that an inflation “hump” ahead will be temporary.

Catherine Mann, an American economist, told an audience in Leeds that she currently did not see a repeat of an extended period of inflation in the months to come, such as that which followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

She described herself as an “activist” on the Bank’s monetary policy committee, having voted last week for a half percentage point interest rate reduction.

Ms Mann said her decision aimed to “cut through the noise” about the right stance for policy given the weaker outlook for employment and the economy than had been previously expected at the end of 2024.

Money latest: My company cut my pay by £700 to cover NI rise

But she cautioned that while her policy path differed to the majority view for “gradual” rate reductions, the Bank rate, she said, would need to remain restrictive for longer.

Ms Mann had been considered the top hawk – a policymaker leaning towards higher rates – on the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC) until it emerged she had backed a half-point cut.

A 0.25 percentage point reduction was passed.

Her earlier worries about rate cuts included a high pace for wage growth and budget-linked investment, stoking inflation down the line.

Last Thursday’s rate decision meeting minutes showed that she, and one other member of the MPC Swati Dhingra, had varied concerns relating to the Bank rate remaining too restrictive at a time of weak economic growth and a weakening employment outlook, with both likely to weigh on inflation naturally.

New Bank staff projections saw the economy growing by just 0.75% this year and inflation topping 3.7% – up from the current 2.5% rate.

Ms Mann told the audience at Leeds Beckett University: “In a speech last February I said, ‘Do not be seduced by the deceleration in headline inflation’. This February, I say, ‘Do not be dismayed by the hump… yet’.”

She expected much of the anticipated increase in inflation this year to come from energy and food, with contributions from other elements such as water bills, phone bills and insurance.

These are factors outside the Bank’s control.

What it wants to avoid is a price spike that forces up wage growth to counter the higher costs – as happened after the energy-led start to the cost of living crisis in 2022.

She said that elements such as budget tax rises on employment would, as Bank surveys have suggested, weigh on both wage growth and therefore inflation.

“I chose 50 basis points now, along with continued restrictiveness in the future, and a higher long-term Bank Rate
to ‘cut through the noise’,” she added.