El Capitan: New supercomputer is the fastest

Some may not want to hear this, but these “fastest supercomputer” list is now meaningless because all the Chinese labs have started obfuscating their progress.

A while ago there were a few labs in China in top 10 and they all attracted sanctions / bad attention. Now no Chinese lab report any data now

I wouldn't say meaningless... just incomplete.

I doubt the US Government is telling everyone about their fastest computer.

They are in good company, with X, Meta, Microsoft and others not reporting theirs either.

The basis for the ranking was a cumulative tracking of benchmark results that were required as part of commissioning bespoke computers. A contract would be written to buy a computer that could achieve a certain performance in operations per second, and in order to satisfy that the benchmarks were agreed to and codified in the contracts. Government contracts are to a certain extent public information so the goals and clout of successive performance were tracked in this way.

If you don’t need to satisfy a government contract, or don’t need the clout to attract engineers or funding, submitting results draws unwanted attention to what you’re cooking up.

The DOE has entered the chat.

(after the nuclear test ban treaty, they run a LOT of simulations)

Unless it's like, air gapped powered by a naval nuclear reactor, I feel like someone would question why a random US gov building is drawing 20-30MW of power, and exhausting most of that as heat...

Isn't that the open secret for El Cap? "Classified workloads" aka weapons sims.

Microsoft has the #4 cluster on the top 500 list. Sure not everyone reports, still seems like a useful list to watch the trends in computing and in particular HPC.

Keep in mind the average hyperscalers cloud is not a particularly good setup for the top500. HPC tends towards more bandwidth, lower latency, and no virtualization.

Not a secret, from IEEE:

The NNSA—which oversees Lawrence Livermore as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories—plans to use El Capitan to “model and predict nuclear weapon performance, aging effects, and safety,”

Aside from the utility, who would know? There's a lot of land out there, relative to the size of even a very large building.

Not disagreeing with you but how could any building draw power without radiating most of it as heat?

Folding-at-home reports theirs. 2020: "Folding@home project passes 2.4 ExaFLOPS, more than the top 500 supercomputers combined" https://www.techspot.com/news/84832-foldinghome-project-pass...

How do you tell the difference between a datacenter and a supercomputer cluster? According to wikipedia, the government data center in Utah is pulling 65 MW.

There's no real secret about nuclear weapons simulations. Sure the software they use is protected and "secret", but the real secret computing facilities are likely there to break encryption and spy on everyone. Nuclear weapons simulations don't really give the US a tactical advantage, but breaking encryption does, and so that kind of compute power would be kept secret.