The newly launched El Capitan, the world's fastest supercomputer, has been developed for national security purposes at a cost of $600 million. It can perform 2.79 quintillion calculations per second, equating to the power of about one million smartphones. El Capitan will be used primarily for nuclear data analysis, weapon testing, and simulations to assess the aging and effectiveness of the aging US nuclear stockpile, which dates back to the 1970s and 1980s. This advancement comes in response to a prohibition on underground testing since 1992.
Most weapons in the current US stockpile were produced during the 1970s and 1980s, making them 55 to 65 years old, according to the Department of Energy.
'Because we stopped doing underground nuclear testing, we needed to replace that with something,' Pythagoras Watson, the team lead of the advanced technology system, told CBS News Bay Area.
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