The US Department of Energy (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) announced that the new El Dorado HPC complex took 20th place in the latest TOP500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, released at the SC24 high-performance computing conference in Atlanta.
Topping the November TOP500 list is the El Capitan, built by HPE Cray. This system exhibits FP64 performance of 1,742 Eflops in the Linpack (HPL) benchmark, and a peak theoretical performance of 2,746 Eflops. El Capitan is based on the HPE Cray Shasta platform based on the AMD Instinct MI300A.
Image source: SNL
It is noted that the El Dorado complex is, in fact, the younger brother of El Capitan. The El Dorado is smaller in scale, but architecturally identical to the leader of the TOP500 rating. The system was built by HPE on the Cray EX4000 platform: a total of 384 nodes based on Instinct MI300A are involved. The total number of cores is 383,040. The HPE Slingshot-11 interconnect is used. The computing nodes received direct liquid cooling.
El Dorado’s performance reaches 68.02 Pflops, and the theoretical peak performance is at around 95.29 Pflops. The supercomputer is essentially a powerful testbed for creating, testing and preparing software code before running it at scale on an exascale El Capitan machine. In addition, El Dorado will allow certain research and development activities to be carried out.