Cray Inc. has signed a $600 million contract to provide the National Nuclear Security Administration with its first exascale supercomputer.

The new machine, called El Capitan, will be delivered in 2022 before going online the following year. It’s expected to have a peak performance of more than 1.5 exaflops, meaning it can perform an impressive 1.5 quintillion calculations per second.

The NNSA said El Capitan will be used to support the needs of its three main research laboratories, including the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. The machine is expected to be able to run nuclear security applications about 10 times faster than the LLNL’s Sierra system, which is currently the world’s second-fastest supercomputer with a 125-petaflops peak performance. El Capitan will also be four times more energy efficient than Sierra, Cray said.

El Capitan will run Cray’s new Shasta supercomputer software, which is said to be a more open and extensible platform than previous generation software. Announced today, the Shasta software extends traditional batch workflow scheduling for modeling and simulation with new Kubernetes container orchestration capabilities.

It will enable what Cray called converged high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads. The software also enables workflow isolation, and helps to foster a more open supercomputing ecosystem with the inclusion of application programmatic interfaces for integrating other software components as well as data access.

The Shasta software will be combined with Cray’s Shasta architecture, which is a hardware specification it announced last year. It can handle a variety of processors and accelerators, depending on the user’s specific needs and what suits the job best.

For example, the NNSA will be able to choose from processor architectures such as Intel Corp.’s and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.’s customary x86 chips, or Nvidia Corp.’s graphics processing units, or perhaps a combination of both. It will also be able to choose from different interconnects, which are used to connect the different components of the machine.

Cray said it will work closely with the NNSA in the coming months to decide which processors and GPU components are best suited to maximize the performance of El Capitan.

Once El Capitan is up and running, it will be used within the NNSA’s Stockpile Stewardship Program to help make “critical assessments necessary for addressing evolving threats to national security, and other purposes such as nonproliferation and nuclear counterterrorism.”

More specifically, this will involve running “exploratory 3D simulations at resolutions that are currently unobtainable, and ensembles of 3D calculations at resolutions that are difficult, time-consuming or even impossible using today’s state-of-the art supercomputers,” the NNSL said. Those simulations are said to be essential for addressing concerns such as nuclear weapons aging, for which no test data is available.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said today’s contract is another big win for Cray in the race for exascale computing. He added that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co., which acquired Cray earlier this year for $1.3 billion, should also benefit from future upsell opportunities for products and services around El Capitan.

“It will be interesting to see what the platform can do in simulations for nuclear proceedings, though we will likely never know,” Mueller said.

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