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

Fun facts, FFT was discovered back in 1965 based on the urgent necessity of discovering and detecting illegal nuke testing activities, just two years after the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) was signed in 1963 [1].

The first sentence statement in the article mentioning that United States and other nuclear powers committed to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1965 is wrong since the treaty was only signed in 1996 not in 1965 [2].

[1] The Algorithm That Almost Stopped The Development Of Nuclear Weapons:

https://www.iflscience.com/the-algorithm-that-almost-stopped...

[2] The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty:

https://www.ctbto.org/our-mission/the-treaty

This is great but I absolutely love that poster of el capitan on the supercomputer racks ! Also TIL there is a list of top500 at https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2024/11/

I fail to understand how these nuclear bomb simulations require so much compute power.

Are they trying to model every single atom?

Is this a case where the physicists in charge get away with programming the most inefficient models possible and then the administration simply replies "oh I guess we'll need a bigger supercomputer"

> El Capitan, housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., can perform over 2700 quadrillion operations per second at its peak. The previous record holder, Frontier, could do just over 2000 quadrillion peak operations per second.

> El Capitan uses AMD’s MI300a chip, dubbed an accelerated processing unit, which combines a CPU and GPU in one package. In total, the system boasts 44,544 MI300As, connected together by HPE’s Slingshot interconnects.

Seems like a nice win for AMD.