How do you make the world’s fastest supercomputer? This week, Technology Now dives into the world of supercomputers, and how El Capitan, the world’s largest supercomputer, was built. We will explore the software and hardware requirements as well as investigating the physical requirements needed to even be able to run a supercomputer on your premises. Bronis de Supinski, CTO of Livermore Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, tells us more.

This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week, hosts Michael Bird and Aubrey Lovell look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations and what can be learnt from it.

About Bronis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronis-de-supinski-607a441/

Sources
El Capitan
https://www.hpe.com/us/en/newsroom/press-release/2024/11/hewlett-packard-enterprise-delivers-worlds-fastest-direct-liquid-cooled-exascale-supercomputer-el-capitan-for-lawrence-livermore-national-laboratory.html
What are FLOPS
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/FLOPS-floating-point-operations-per-second

Today I Learned
Ma. Y., et all, 2025, Near-infrared spatiotemporal colour vision in humans enabled by upconversion contact lenses, ISSN 0092-8674, 10.1016/j.cell.2025.04.019
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00454-4

This Week in History
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20201028-history-of-the-ballpoint-pen
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/space-pens