A Chinese system has become the world’s most powerful supercomputer, overtaking American machines for the first time since 2021.
Lineshine, installed on ChinaNational Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen tops 67th top500 ranking One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The new system is already used in many fields, giving developers another route to obtaining supercomputing power.
The machine, which comes online in the first half of 2026, can reach speeds of 2.198 exaflops – where 1 exaflop is 1 quintillion (10)18) floating-point operations, or mathematical calculations, per second (FLOPs) – making it the only supercomputer on the planet to do more than 2 exaFLOPS per second. This is the first time that China has hosted the world’s fastest supercomputer since 2017.
FLOP is a type of count used to benchmark computing performance. exascale supercomputer Each can execute more than 1 quintillion operations per second. In comparison, home computers can perform about 5 trillion flops.
According to TOP500, Lineshine can achieve speeds about 22% faster than El Capitan, the supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, which previously held the top spot from November 2024.
According to a translation, the system’s computing power is the result of “a sweeping breakthrough across a series of key technical barriers”. statement From the National Supercomputing Center of China.
Unlike many other supercomputers, Lineshine uses only central processing units (CPUs) to perform calculations. Other systems rely on both a CPU and a graphics processing unit (GPU), which run multiple tasks simultaneously by dividing tasks among smaller, specialized cores.
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Since 2018, the US government restricted export Supply of semiconductor chips to China, including GPUs. However, startups like deepseek Other technological advances have challenged other technological advances to train artificial intelligence (AI) models with smaller and less powerful GPUs than comparable systems like ChatGPT.
Lineshine “represents a historic leap forward for China’s supercomputing field, breaking through foreign technological barriers to build an independent and controllable software and hardware system,” the statement said.
According to the National Supercomputing Centre, the system has already been used on projects in several research areas, including atmospheric science, drug discovery and AI. In general, supercomputers perform extremely complex calculations at a far faster rate than conventional computers, allowing them to solve problems that would otherwise take too much time or cost too much to solve.
The fastest supercomputers use a range of different designs and processors, showing that high-performance computing does not rely on any one single method.
“The list reflects that there is no single dominant technology path to leadership-class computing; instead, vendors are adopting a variety of CPU, GPU, APU, and custom-accelerator approaches with different interconnects and system designs,” TOP500 representatives said in a statement. statement.
After Lineshine and El Capitan, two supercomputers at US national laboratories and one in Germany claimed the third to fifth positions. TOP500 list. Machines from Italy, Switzerland, Japan and America are in the top 10.
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