China has reclaimed the world’s fastest supercomputer crown for the first time since 2017, according to the latest TOP500 rankings released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday.
LineShine, built by the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, achieved 2.198 exaflops of performance – nearly 2.2 quintillion calculations per second – surpassing the previous champion, El Capitan, at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which reached 1.809 exaflops.
It is also the first supercomputer to exceed two exaflops using only central processing units (CPUs), without relying on graphics processing units (GPUs) that power most of today’s leading supercomputers.
“This is the first time a computer with only CPUs has reached exascale,” TOP500 co-founder and Turing Award winner Jack Dongarra told the South China Morning Post.
Most exascale systems, including El Capitan, depend heavily on GPUs, which excel at handling many calculations simultaneously. The chips have become a focal point of US efforts to curb China’s advances in AI and supercomputing.
“China can adapt to develop its own version of technology as good as – or maybe even better than – existing technology, despite US export controls,” Dongarra said.