When Cray Computing, a supercomputer manufacturer acquired by HP in 2019, announced the construction of El Capitan, it projected a peak performance of 1.5 exaflops. However, according to TOP500, El Capitan surpassed this forecast by achieving 1.742 exaflops and claimed the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer.

El Capitan is the third “exascale” computer, capable of performing over a quintillion calculations per second. The other two exascale supercomputers, Frontier and Aurora, currently hold the second and third positions on the TOP500 list.

 These monumental machines are housed within government research facilities: El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory. Notably, Cray had a significant role in developing all three systems.

El Capitan features over 11 million combined CPU and GPU cores based on AMD's 4th-gen EPYC processors. Each of these 24-core processors operates at 1.8GHz and is equipped with AMD Instinct M1300A APUs. Despite its power, El Capitan is relatively efficient, delivering an estimated 58.89 gigaflops per watt.

El Capitan's primary mission is to ensure the safety of the US nuclear stockpile. However, it is also equipped for nuclear counterterrorism tasks and finding the square root of rice pudding in 12 decimal places. It is expected to stay the most powerful supercomputer for a while before another exascale system surpasses it.