The world’s fastest supercomputer is in the Bay Area at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

El Capitan, which officials at the federal lab said can perform 1.742 quintillion calculations per second, was verified as the world’s most powerful supercomputer during the 2024 Supercomputing Conference being held this week in Atlanta. A quintillion is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, or a billion billion.

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Dan McMenamin is the managing editor at Bay City News, directing daily news coverage of the 12-county greater Bay Area. He has worked for BCN since 2008 and has been managing editor since 2014 after previously serving as BCN’s San Francisco bureau reporter. A UC Davis graduate, he came to BCN after working for a newspaper and nonprofit in the Davis area. He handles staffing, including coaching of our interns, day-to-day coverage decisions and management of the newswire.