China's LineShine overtakes US rival to become world's fastest supercomputer

China has reclaimed the top spot in the global supercomputing rankings, with its newly unveiled LineShine system overtaking the United States' El Capitan as the world's most powerful supercomputer.

The latest TOP500 rankings, released on Tuesday, 23 June, placed the LineShine supercomputer at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen at the top of the list, marking the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system has claimed the no. 1 position. The debut appearance of LineShine on the rankings also underscores China's advances in high-performance computing, an area often viewed as a barometer of technological capability.

According to the TOP500 project, LineShine achieved a performance of 2.198 exaflops, enabling it to carry out more than two quintillion calculations per second.

The United States' El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, slipped to second place. It is followed by two other American supercomputers based at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois, while Germany's Jupiter system dropped to fifth.

The five machines are currently the only publicly verified exascale supercomputers in operation worldwide.

Unlike many of today's leading high-performance systems, LineShine does not rely on graphics processing units (GPUs), which have become the dominant hardware for artificial intelligence workloads. Instead, it operates entirely on conventional central processing units (CPUs), setting it apart from most of its rivals.

The TOP500 project said the system consumes about 42.2 megawatts of electricity during operation.