The U.S. Department of Energy has signed a contract with Cray to build the powerful El Capitan supercomputer to manage its nuclear arsenal.

Supercomputer maker Cray has contracted with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop and ship the world's fastest supercomputer, which will cost the US budget $ 600 million. The US National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will also take part in the creation of the device.

El Capitan will be the first such device, the performance of which will overcome the barrier in one exaflops: it will be able to perform one quintillion (10 to the 18th degree) operations per second. The system will be built on the new Cray Shasta architecture with ClusterStor storage and Slingshot interconnect technology. The supercomputer is planned to be used to control the US nuclear arsenal.

In particular, El Capitan will be used to quickly assess critical situations in the event of threats to national security and other tasks related to the management of nuclear weapons. It will run 50 times faster than the current Sequoia system in LLNL and 10 times faster than Sierra's second most powerful supercomputer. El Capitan is expected to be commissioned in 2023.

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