Advanced Micro Devices (AMD  ) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE  ) have been awarded a joint contract to develop a supercomputer for the Department of Energy that will be used to model nuclear weapons.

AMD and HPE won the $600 million contract, which will see the companies delivering the "El Capitan" supercomputer to the Department of Energy for use in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The computer will be used to model nuclear weapons detonations, which is done in place of live testing due to international prohibitions on nuclear weapons testing. The simulated blasts will help maintain and modernize the U.S. nuclear stockpile.

El Capitan and computers like it are of a new generation of supercomputer entirely, capable of incredible new speeds that are 1000 times faster than existing systems. El Capitan will be capable of performing operations with a peak speed of two exaFLOPs (floating-point operations per second, a measure of computer speed), which is more than the 200 most powerful supercomputers in the world combined.

From a business standpoint, El Capitan stands to spur supercomputer development for the private sector. HPE already plans to apply the technology used to create El Capitan to its product development to produce new products for businesses. "You could do it in a single cabinet or a single chassis and have the same technology," says HPE Pete Ungaro, head of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at HPE. "A single cabinet of this technology is probably more powerful than most all enterprises have in their data centers. That's how powerful this is."

The news had mixed effects on AMD and HPE's stock. HPE saw no noticeable benefit, closing 2.62% down after trading on March 4. AMD closed 7.19% up on the same day. HPE's guidance for 2020 is not looking particularly positive, with CEO Antonio Neri informing investors that the company does not expect revenue to grow, which may have negated any stock gains the announcement may have had.