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El Capitan ranked No. 1 on the November 2024 TOP500, posting 1,742 petaflops per second (PFlop/s) on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. HPE built the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory system using AMD processors and accelerators. That is a dated ranking milestone, not its current position: the TOP500 record lists El Capitan at No. 2 in June 2026, with a remeasured HPL result of 1,809 PFlop/s.
What is the El Capitan supercomputer?
El Capitan is a supercomputer installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California. HPE built it on the HPE Cray EX255a platform; TOP500 identifies AMD 4th Gen EPYC processors, AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators, Slingshot-11 networking, and the TOSS operating system in its system record. Its November 2024 entry lists HPE as manufacturer and 2024 as the installation year. TOP500’s system record provides the hardware and ranking history.
This is institutional infrastructure for U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration missions, not a consumer computer. HPE says the work supports nuclear stockpile safety, security, reliability, and modernization, as well as research areas such as materials discovery, nuclear data, high-energy-density science, and fusion. Those are the system’s stated mission and intended research benefits, rather than independently measured outcomes. HPE’s announcement describes its design and intended uses.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsHow fast is El Capitan?
TOP500 ranks systems using HPL, a benchmark based on solving a dense system of linear equations. Its Rmax figure is the measured result; Rpeak is the theoretical peak performance. The values below are from two different TOP500 editions, so the June 2026 figures should not be read as the November 2024 ranking result.
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| TOP500 edition | Rank | HPL Rmax | Theoretical Rpeak | Cores | Power |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| November 2024 | No. 1 | 1,742.00 PFlop/s | 2,746.38 PFlop/s | 11,039,616 | 29,580.98 kW |
| June 2026 | No. 2 | 1,809.00 PFlop/s | 2,821.10 PFlop/s | 11,340,000 | 29,684.62 kW |
These are the edition-specific figures in TOP500’s system record. One petaflop per second is 1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second; 1,000 PFlop/s equals one exaflop per second. El Capitan’s November 2024 measured HPL result was therefore 1.742 exaflops.
HPL performance is not a universal measure of how quickly a system handles every scientific workload. It makes systems comparable on a particular benchmark; the time needed for a specific simulation or other application depends on that workload and how it uses the machine.
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How did El Capitan top the TOP500?
In November 2024, El Capitan’s 1,742 PFlop/s HPL result exceeded the other listed systems. Frontier was second at 1,353 PFlop/s, and Aurora was third at 1,012 PFlop/s. TOP500 described Aurora’s result as preliminary, a qualification that matters when comparing the entries. All three were U.S. Department of Energy laboratory systems, and each exceeded one exaflop per second on HPL in that edition.
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| November 2024 system | TOP500 rank | HPL result | Result qualification |
|---|---|---|---|
| El Capitan | No. 1 | 1,742 PFlop/s | Measured result listed by TOP500 |
| Frontier | No. 2 | 1,353 PFlop/s | Measured result listed by TOP500 |
| Aurora | No. 3 | 1,012 PFlop/s | Preliminary measurement, per TOP500 |
Figures and Aurora’s qualification are from the November 2024 TOP500 list and its November 2024 highlights. A rank describes the result relative to other submitted systems in that list edition; it does not establish that one machine is faster for every application.
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What do HPE and AMD contribute?
The TOP500 entry identifies the platform and components; HPE’s announcement supplies more detail about how they fit together. HPE describes the MI300A as an accelerated processing unit that integrates CPU cores, GPU cores, and high-bandwidth memory in one package. It also describes an Ethernet-based Slingshot fabric linking more than 11,000 nodes, custom near-node storage, and a global Lustre-based file system. These are vendor descriptions of the system design.
The result is a system developed and deployed by HPE for LLNL with AMD compute hardware and a high-speed interconnect. In a statement in AMD’s announcement, Rob Neely, director of LLNL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program, said El Capitan would support large ensembles of high-fidelity 3D simulations addressing challenges in the NNSA mission. AMD’s announcement attributes the statement to Neely.
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What should you make of the efficiency figures?
The published November 2024 efficiency figures do not agree. HPE reported 58.89 gigaflops per watt, while TOP500’s November highlights page stated 60.3 gigaflops per watt. Using the November list’s 1,742 PFlop/s Rmax and 29,580.98 kW power figures gives approximately 58.9 gigaflops per watt. Because the sources differ, it is clearer to cite the underlying list values for comparisons than to present either efficiency figure as an uncontested result.
For context, HPE’s November 18, 2024 announcement is the source for its 58.89 figure; TOP500’s November highlights gives 60.3, and the November list supplies the performance and power values used for the calculation.
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