El Capitan and Frontier, both powered by AMD processors and accelerators, have retained the top two positions on the latest Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
Supercomputing leadership
The recently released Top500 rankings show that El Capitan, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, remains the fastest system globally, registering a High Performance Linpack (HPL) score of 1.742 exaflops. Frontier, situated at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, holds the second position with an HPL result of 1.353 exaflops.
Both supercomputers were constructed by HPE and utilise AMD hardware at their core. El Capitan uses AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing units (APUs), integrating CPU and GPU functionality within a single package, aimed at supporting large-scale artificial intelligence and scientific workloads. Frontier leverages AMD EPYC CPUs alongside AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs for a variety of advanced computational research needs, including modelling in energy, climate, and next-generation artificial intelligence.
Broader AMD presence
AMD technologies now underpin 172 supercomputing systems out of the 500 included in the latest Top500 list. This figure represents more than a third of all the high-performance systems measured. Notably, 17 new systems joined the list this year running on AMD processors, five of which use the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC architecture.
The expanded presence spans institutions such as the University of Stuttgart’s High-Performance Computing Center, where the Hunter system is powered by AMD Instinct MI300A APUs; the University of Hull’s Viper supercomputer; and Italy’s new EUROfusion Pitagora system at CINECA, powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs.
Performance and efficiency
In addition to sheer computational power, AMD’s showing on the Top500 list extends to energy efficiency. According to the most recent Green500 list, 12 of the 20 most energy-efficient supercomputers globally use AMD EPYC processors and AMD Instinct accelerators. El Capitan and Frontier ranked 26th and 32nd respectively on the Green500 index, reflecting their performance-per-watt capabilities given their computing output.
This was echoed in alternative benchmarks. On the HPL-MxP test, which measures mixed-precision computing suited for artificial intelligence workloads, El Capitan debuted at the top, reaching 16.7 exaflops, with Frontier in third place and LUMI, another AMD system, in fourth. The HPCG (High-Performance Conjugate Gradient) test, a complementary performance metric for scientific applications, saw El Capitan post the highest benchmark score of 17.4 petaflops, marking it out for memory bandwidth enabled by the Instinct MI300A architecture.
Institutional perspectives
“From El Capitan to Frontier, AMD continues to power the world’s most advanced supercomputers, delivering record-breaking performance and leadership energy efficiency,” said Forrest Norrod, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Data Center Solutions Group, AMD. “With the latest Top500 list, AMD not only holds the top two spots but now powers 172 of the world’s fastest systems—more than ever before—underscoring our accelerating momentum and the trust HPC leaders place in our CPUs and GPUs to drive scientific discovery and AI innovation.”
Rob Neely, Associate Director for Weapon Simulation and Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, described the impact of El Capitan:
“El Capitan is a transformative national resource that will dramatically expand the computational capabilities of the NNSA labs at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia in support of our national security and science missions. With AMD’s advanced APU architecture, we can now perform simulations with the precision and confidence we set as a goal 15 years ago, when the path to exascale was difficult to foresee. As a bonus, this platform is a true ‘two-fer’ – an HPC and AI powerhouse that will fundamentally reshape how we fulfill our mission.”
Future direction
The distinction on the Top500 and Green500 lists coincides with a broader shift within high performance computing, as artificial intelligence and traditional HPC workloads increasingly converge. AMD’s presence in the sector demonstrates demand for scalable and efficient compute platforms amid growing power requirements for data-intensive scientific and industrial workloads.
The results also indicate the use of a portfolio that includes CPUs, GPUs, and APUs to accelerate developments across domains ranging from nuclear safety and climate modelling, to training large language models and generative artificial intelligence inference.
