Events

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD will deliver what they expect to be the world's fastest supercomputer in 2023, a $600 million machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory called El Capitan they promise will perform at 2 exaflops, or 2 quintillion calculations per second. That's fast enough that if the world's human population could perform one such calculation per second, it would take everybody eight years to match 1 second's worth of El Capitan computing.

The current fastest machine, as measured by the Top500 ranking released by supercomputing researchers twice each year, is the IBM-built Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Upgrades have boosted its performance to 143 petaflops.

"We expect when it's delivered to the laboratory in 2023, it will be the fastest supercomputer in the world," Bill Goldstein, director of the Livermore lab, said Wednesday. He spoke at a press conference at HPE offices in San Jose, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, at which HPE, AMD and LLNL announced their El Capitan ambitions along with design details.