The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has awarded Cray Inc. a $600-million contract to build the El Capitan exascale supercomputer, which the agency wants to start crunching numbers in 2023 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Cray must deliver El Capitan in late 2022, the NNSA stated in a press release Tuesday. The machine “is expected to go into production by late 2023,” according to a separate release from Lawrence Livermore.
The agency did not reveal more detailed terms of its arrangement with Seattle-based Cray, or say how many responsive requests it received after the solicitation for the machine hit the street in spring 2018.
El Capitan is planned to have a peak performance of more than 1.5 exaflops, or 1.5 quintillion calculations per second, according to Livermore’s press release — much more than the current crop of supercomputers.
As with existing supercomputers at Livermore, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, El Capitan would be capable of high-powered computer simulations that can help nuclear security professionals understand how existing weapons age, and what modifications might be required to prolong the life of these weapons.
The NNSA is procuring El Capitan as part of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, announced in 2018 by Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
Funding for the program comes from the NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing account. El Capitan had about a $33 million budget for fiscal 2019, and the agency is seeking $58 million for the 2020 fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1. Overall, the NNSA wants roughly $840 million for Advanced Simulation and Computing in 2020, up from the $715 million budget for 2019.
