Last year the United States Department of Energy announced its need for a third supercomputer to be built in 2023 and installed in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This is of course not for computing weather patterns, but naturally for modelling nuclear weapons.
It's the supercomputing specialist Cray who will be delivering the monster system. In multiple press releases, one from Cray's parent company Hewlett Packard, we get a closer look:
AMD Genoa Zen 4 CPUs will be used, along with Radeon Instinct GPU. It will consume under 40MW, with a peak performance of 2 ExaFlops, one Exaflop being 1,000,000 times a tera-Flop. It will be flanked by a 1.5 and a 1. ExaFLOP supercomputer at other locations as a part of the big Coral-2 program.
All this doesn't come cheap, El Capitan comes with a $600 million price tag. To put things into perspective, the current IBM POWER 9 supercomputer with Nvidia Volta will be outperformed by a factor of 16.
While a system that is 16 times more powerful should be capable of calculating nuclear weapons, which is a better alternative to testing them in the real world, it is designed with other research fields in mind, although these are secondary.