China takes US crown on ranking of world’s fastest supercomputers
China’s LineShine overtakes US-based El Capitan as most powerful supercomputer, according to the TOP500 list. China has displaced the United States on an influential ranking
China’s LineShine overtakes US-based El Capitan as most powerful supercomputer, according to the TOP500 list. China has displaced the United States on an influential ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers, underscoring Beijing’s growing capability to compete with the world’s leading superpower in cutting-edge technology. China’s LineShine is the most powerful system on the planet, overtaking the US-based El Capitan, according to the biannual ranking announced in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday. LineShine, located at the Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, achieved a performance of 2.198 exaflops, carrying out more than 2 quintillion calculations per second – a 20 percent lead over El Capitan, according to the latest TOP500 list. LineShine’s position marks the first time a Chinese system has topped the list since Sunway TaihuLight did so in 2017.
El Capitan, based at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, had ranked as the top-performing system since November 2024. Frontier, hosted by the Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee, ranked third, followed by Aurora at the Argonne Laboratory in Illinois and Jupiter at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany. Other countries represented in the top 20 include the UK, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Unlike other supercomputers, LineShine runs entirely on general-purpose central processing units (CPUs), which have fewer processing cores and are slower at performing complex tasks than the graphics processing units (GPUs) indispensable to running AI models, such as ChatGPT and Claude. LineShine is the first and only system to achieve more than 2 exaflops in performance using a CPU-only design, according to the TOP500 list.
The TOP500 list has been published twice yearly since 1993, when computer scientists Erich Strohmaier and Hans Meuer first compiled statistics on supercomputers around the world in preparation for a conference on the topic. The list ranks supercomputers’ performance using the LINPACK Benchmark, which measures the amount of time it takes to solve a dense system of linear equations. While the TOP500 list has been influential for decades, experts consider the ranking to have become less relevant since the advent of AI. While corporate tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon are at the forefront of today’s advances in AI, the list is largely made up of government and academic initiatives that volunteered their participation. In a 2015 paper, researchers at Cornell University estimated that El Capitan achieved only 22 percent of the computational performance of xAI’s Colossus supercomputing facility in Memphis, Tennessee.
The BriefWire