Three years ago we saw the announcement of El Capitan, a supercomputer being developed by HPE in collaboration with AMD, and today we can finally confirm that the installation process has started. We also have some images, and the truth is that despite all the years that I have been in the technological world, these things continue to impress me.
First of all, it is important to note that this installation process will take a while, and that once it is complete, there will still be an implementation stage ahead that will not end until sometime in 2024. This equipment will be used to fulfill certain purposes in the field of national security, and will have a power of about 2 EXAFLOPS.
Thanks to this level of power, this supercomputer will enter the list of 500 most powerful computers in the world, but we will have to wait for the 2024 edition to see where it ranks. At the hardware level, this computer uses AMD Instinct Mi300A accelerators, each of them is configured with a CPU that has 24 Zen 4 cores, its GPU uses the CDNA3 graphics architecture, and it has 128 GB of high-bandwidth HBM3 memory.
It’s important to note that that 128 GB of HBM3 memory is shared between the CPU and GPU, and that on the El Capitan supercomputer each HPE node uses four of these accelerators, which means we have 96 Zen 4 cores, four CDNA3 GPUs, and 512 GB of HBM3 memory per node.
All nodes have liquid refrigeration to keep working temperatures under control, although we do not yet have details about the storage configuration that this supercomputer will use. We know that its consumption will be around approximately 40 megawatts.
As I told you at the time, those 2 EXAFLOPs are equivalent to 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 mathematical operations per secondan impressive figure that we can better contextualize and internalize with a very simple comparison, if all the inhabitants of the planet were capable of completing a mathematical operation in a second it would take eight years to reach the level of El Capitan. The delivery deadlines have been met, since these were precisely scheduled for 2023.
