The AMD-based El Capitan supercomputer is not set to go surfing till 2023. Nonetheless, in preparation for the brand new exascale supercomputer, the Nationwide Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA, to not be confused with the NSA or NASA) has produced three smaller prototype supercomputers to check out El Captains’ {hardware} techniques. Regardless of not being the true supercomputer deal, these three computing monsters have been discovered to pack a critical punch, with every touchdown on the highest 200 checklist of the world’s quickest supercomputers.
El Capitan is a brand-new exascale supercomputer behemoth being constructed for the NNSA that can be chargeable for modeling nuclear weapon simulations. As soon as accomplished, El Capitan is predicted to be, on the very least, the quickest supercomputer owned by the USA authorities, with an estimated 2 exaflops of computing energy.
Powering this monstrosity can be a mixture of AMD CPUs and accelerators, together with AMD EPYC Genoa CPUs constructed on AMD’s Zen 4 structure, and next-generation Radeon Intuition GPUs, which can doubtless be primarily based on an enterprise model of RDNA3. Regardless, El Capitan can be constructed largely round AMD {hardware}.
The three prototype precursor techniques inbuilt preparation for El Capitan are often known as rzVernal, Tioga, and Tenaya. Every is constructed with HP Enterprise Cray EX235a accelerator blades packing third technology (Zen 3) EPYC 64 core CPUs and AMD Intuition MI250X (CDNA2) accelerators. In accordance with HPCwire, a few of the parts constructed into every of those servers will make their approach into the ultimate iteration of El Capitan.
Out of the three techniques, rzVernal ranks the quickest with and lands at quantity 123, that includes 4.1 petaflops of efficiency in Excessive-Efficiency Linpack. Tioga landed shut behind at quantity 135, with 3.67 petaflops, and Tenaya edges onto the checklist at quantity 200, with 2.86 petaflops of efficiency. However, once more, that’s place 200 on the checklist of the quickest supercomputers worldwide, so it’s miles from a foul outcome.
That is spectacular contemplating all three are simply check techniques and never constructed for full operational use. And these outcomes will nonetheless be nothing compared to the full-power El Capitan as soon as it goes on-line. If the projected 2 exaflops of computing energy are true, it will likely be one of many quickest, if not the quickest, supercomputer in your complete world.