China’s LineShine overtakes US rival to become world’s most powerful supercomputer
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China's LineShine supercomputer has surged to the top of the global rankings, displacing the US's El Capitan to become the world's most powerful machine and marking the first time since 2017 that China has reclaimed the summit of high-performance computing.
The Shenzhen-based system outpaced the previously top-ranked US supercomputer, El Capitan, in the latest list released on Tuesday, underscoring China’s growing technological strength in high-performance computing.
Developed at China’s National Supercomputing Center, LineShine achieved a performance of 2.198 exaflops, enabling it to carry out more than two quintillion calculations every second.
Its debut at the summit of the Top500 list is particularly notable because it relies entirely on conventional central processing units (CPUs), rather than the graphics processing units (GPUs) that increasingly dominate artificial intelligence workloads.
The machine requires approximately 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate and joins an elite group of publicly verified exascale computers. El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, slipped to second place, followed by two other US systems based at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois. Germany’s Jupiter supercomputer fell to fifth.
Supercomputers, which can be more than 1,000 times faster than ordinary computers, play a crucial role in scientific research and national security. They are used to model climate systems, accelerate medical discoveries, simulate nuclear explosions, conduct virtual weapons testing and analyse complex patterns of human behaviour.
Beyond China and the United States, Italy, Switzerland and Japan also feature in the global top 10. The United Kingdom has 11 systems in the Top500 list, with the University of Bristol’s Isambard-AI ranked 11th.
The latest rankings come amid intensifying global competition in advanced computing. The European Union recently unveiled a €20 billion strategy to establish AI “gigafactories”, equipped with vast supercomputing infrastructure aimed at driving breakthroughs in healthcare, biotechnology, robotics and scientific research, while balancing concerns over energy consumption and environmental sustainability.