ABQ Times

Sandia National Laboratories' El Dorado supercomputer has been ranked as the 20th fastest globally, according to the latest Top500 list released at the 2024 Supercomputing Conference in Atlanta. The El Dorado is architecturally identical to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's El Capitan supercomputer, which claimed the top spot in the same survey.

Andrew Younge, a supercomputing manager at Sandia, expressed enthusiasm about leveraging both systems for enhanced simulation capabilities. "We at Sandia have invested in preparing many of our engineering and science codes to run effectively on El Capitan and El Dorado," he stated. "I am looking forward to taking advantage of this massive new capability with El Capitan and enabling a much higher level of fidelity in our simulations."

Younge highlighted that the combined system of El Dorado and El Capitan is the first leadership-class exascale system aimed at supporting the National Nuclear Security Administration’s stockpile stewardship missions. He described El Dorado as an application-readiness test system: "Basically, it is an extra-large on-ramp for Sandia computing codes to build, test, prepare, validate and update, all at Sandia, before running at exascale on El Capitan."

Due to its size compared to typical application readiness systems, Younge anticipates that El Dorado will also offer production cycles for Sandia. Furthermore, it may facilitate experimental research and development on high-performance computing systems by exploring new workflows or similar avenues.

Kevin Stroup, another computing manager at Sandia, pointed out key features contributing to the system's performance. “Part of the magic — I call it the ‘special sauce’ — of the system is the use of the Cray-developed proprietary high-speed network called Slingshot,” said Stroup. He also noted that direct liquid cooling of compute nodes allows effective heat management: “Without this, it would be nearly impossible to operate the system and deal with the heat produced.”