The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has formally completed a facility modernization project that marks the beginning of the transition of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to a new supercomputing platform.
DOE said Wednesday the Exascale Computing Facility Modernization project upgraded the laboratory’s existing cooling capacity and electrical system and added new transmission lines, switches and substations to power NNSA’s first exascale computer.
The supercomputing platform, dubbed El Capitan, will perform at a capacity of at least 1 quintillion calculations a second to provide exascale-class computing service to LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
“We are pleased that this project has received approval for CD-4. It plays a vital role in supporting NNSA’s goal of bringing a more advanced computing capability to the complex.” said Mike Lang, federal program manager for the Advanced Simulation and Computing program.
Cray, a division within Hewlett Packard Enterprise, built the El Capitan exascale computer under a $600M contract NNSA awarded in 2019 to support the agency’s nuclear weapons stockpile maintenance initiatives.
