Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have signed a $600 million deal to manufacture the world's fastest supercomputer to test the United States' nuclear weapons, the two companies disclosed on Wednesday.
Named "El Capitan" - coined after the iconic rock face in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California - the supercomputer will be housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The Department of Energy supermachine is expected to be 10 times faster than the most powerful supercomputers in existence today, running at 2 Exaflops, or 2 quintillion calculations per second.
El Capitan It will also be used by two other nuclear laboratories - the Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory. The supercomputer is expected to be delivered early next, the groups announced during a news briefing hosted at HPE's North San Jose headquarters.
Covering an area the size of two basketball courts with weight equivalent to 35 school buses, El Capitan will be used to simulate nuclear explosions without actually having to perform them.
The awarding of the microchip contract to AMD is a huge victory for the software firm, which currently has contracts for two of the three fastest computers under development by the US government. AMD said El Capitan will feature the Epyc Central Processing Units, Radeon Instinct graphics processing units and its ROCm heterogeneous computing operating system.
Seattle supercomputer maker Cray Inc. was in discussions about the program with the National Nuclear Security Administration before the San Jose information technology company procured Cray for $1.4 billion in September last year, continuing the meetings and eventually leading to the signing of the deal as HPE.
All but one of the current 10 best and fastest supercomputers in the world today use processing chips from either Intel Corp or International Business Machines Inc, supercomputing research agency TOP500 said. The exception is the third fastest, which is based in China and uses a locally-made chip.
Stocks of AMD rallied 5.4 percent during its latest trading, shares of HPE fell 4.9 percent, while the S&P 500 index soared 2.9 percent. On Wednesday, AMD's share was given an upgrade by Wall Street analysts, while HPE missed revenue expectations and cautioned it does not see its revenue growing this year.
El Capitan has twice the power of the supercomputer that AMD rival Intel Corp. is making for the Argonne National Laboratory in the state of Illinois. Scheduled for delivery in 2023, the Argonne was the first supercomputer that can run with a speed of one exaFLOP.
