Gallery of Industries

[Johnnycomelately]

Thread for windows on, or viewpoints of, gamechanging or important industrial facilities. The kind of access that I realized was rare or non existent, when I was studying engineering back in the early 80’s, before the internet really got rolling.

Here is a vid by Scott Manley, an engineer who mostly posts about rocketry, about the US supercomputer at Laurence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore California. Named El Capitan, this was the world’s most powerful computer until about 2 months before this was filmed, when a Chinese supercomputer took that title.

First half of the vid is about the hardware involved, from the arrangement of and interconnections between the silicone bits, to the supporting infrastructures that provide power and cooling. Second half deals mostly with the software it runs, and how that must be tuned to the capabilities of the hardware.

Edit: Title was changed, from when I found the upload. Previous title was “What puts the ‘Super’ in Supercomputer”.

L = 1:27:10

What Do They Run on America's Fastest SuperComputer?

Scott Manley
1.87M subscribers

Sep 25, 2026

In July I paid a visit to Lawrence Livermore National Labs which hosts the fastest supercomputer in the US, a couple of months earlier it was the fastest supercomputer in the world, but Moore's law means computer supremacy is fleeting.

El Capitan is an exaflop scale system, meaning is can run 10^18 calculations per second (a billion, billion), and this is measured by benchmarks that require tight cooperation between it's thousands of cores. There are datacenters with many more processors, but those may not perform at the same level because of the interconnectedness required for this kind of task.

So, I wanted to look at the whole installation from bottom to top to make it clear that a supercomputer is more than having huge numbers of processors in a datacenter.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HlsyZAWnOu8