El Capitan is the third exascale system deployed by the United States and its primary purpose is to support the stockpile stewardship program of the US National Nuclear Security Administration.
El Capitan uses an APU architecture, where the CPU and GPU share an internal on-chip coherent interconnect.
"[6] El Capitan was ordered as a part of the Department of Energy's CORAL-2 initiative, intended to replace Sierra, an IBM/NVIDIA machine deployed in 2018.
The lab noted that the supercomputer cost $600 million to build and will handle various sensitive and classified tasks having to do with the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The ceremony was attended by the CEOs of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Antonio Neri and Lisa Su, who were present to celebrate the occasion.
Su elaborated, "It's basically the same building blocks, as Antonio said, configured in a different way," emphasizing the adaptability of the technology developed for El Capitan in enhancing their AI efforts.