The supercomputer, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieves 1.742 exaFLOPs. China's machines could be even faster, but it's not sharing details publicly.

With a sustained compute power of 1.7 exaflops and a peak of over 2.7 exaflops, El Capitan knocks previous leader Frontier to second on the list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. El Capitan was built by HPE for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to simulate nuclear weapons tests.

El Capitan’s data processing abilities represent a major advancement in scientific research, particularly for managing the nuclear stockpile.

El Capitan has more than 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD 4th-gen EPYC processors. These 24-core processors are rated at 1.8GHz each and have AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. It's also relatively efficient, as such systems go, squeezing out an estimated 58.89 Gigaflops per watt.

El Capitan” takes top spot in global supercomputer race, helping tackle daunting challenges in national security and science.

Newcomer El Capitan unseated five-time No. 1 system Frontier and is now the third exascale machine in the TOP500 supercomputer rankings.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Hewlett Packard Enterprise