Preview of Lawrence Livermore Lab's 'El Capitan' future exascale computer

6/10/2019

The third of three new exa-scale computers set to be purchased and built by Secretary Rick Perry and the Department of Energy.

Robin Goldstone, a solution architect at LLNL, gave an interview at the Red Hat Summit 2019. She suggested el capitan will be 10x the performance of Sierra (which is 125 petaflops, and "so El Capitan's targeted to be 1.2, maybe 1.5 exaFLOPS, or even more. Again, that's peak performance, it doesn't necessarily translate into what our applications can get out of the platform." In concept, we can use this to "push a workload through 10 times faster or we can look at a simulation that's 10 times more resolved" (better detail).

There will be an El Capitan Center of Excellence at LLNL (deployment and production use from 2023 - 2038). It should focus on AI and machine learning, and advancing the goal of intelligent simulation or cognitive computing.

El Capitan (ATS-4) is the successor to Sierra, and will be succeeded by (ATS-6) in 2027-2028 timeframe.

In March 2019's DoE FY2020 Congressional Budget Justification:
Highlights of the FY 2020 Budget:

Support the development of exascale computing and associated software and applications, including non-recurring engineering development for the exascale system, ATS-4/El Capitan.

FY 2021 - FY 2024 Key Computational Systems and Software Environment Milestones:

ATS-3/Crossroads acceptance, FY 2021
Exascale computing environment, FY 2022
ATS-4/El Capitan acceptance, FY 2023
Develop advanced machine learning techniques for nuclear weapons complex applications.

LLNL needs more computing capability to achieve and advance its mission. "More computing capability is needed." (Original in bold.)

Good one pagers on the DoE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) (thank you Rick Stevens, Argonne National Laboratory & The University of Chicago):