Chinese LineShine supercomputer tops global rankings for first time since 2017

A Chinese supercomputer called LineShine has been ranked the world’s fastest in the latest Top500 list released on Tuesday. The machine, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, displaced the previous leader, the U.S. El Capitan system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

LineShine achieved 2.198 exaflops, performing more than 2 quintillion calculations per second. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has held the top position on the list, which is sometimes viewed as a measure of national technological capability.

power use LineShine runs entirely on conventional computer chips rather than the graphics processors commonly used for artificial-intelligence workloads. It requires about 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate, according to the Top500 data. El Capitan now ranks second.

Two additional U.S. supercomputers at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois follow in third and fourth place. Germany’s Jupiter system dropped to fifth.

national standings The five exascale systems are the only publicly verified machines of that scale in the world. Italy, Switzerland and Japan also have entries in the top 10. The United Kingdom has 11 machines on the full list of 500. The University of Bristol’s Isambard-AI, fitted with 5,400 Nvidia superchips, is the highest-ranked British system at number 11.

Western Australia’s Setonix ranks 86th and is the best-performing of four Australian machines on the list.