China has reclaimed the title of the world’s fastest supercomputer for the first time since 2017.
LineShine, installed at the National Supercomputer Centre in Shenzhen, achieved 2.198 exaflops of performance and moved directly to the top of the latest TOP500 ranking.
It overtook El Capitan at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, which recorded 1.809 exaflops.
LineShine is the first supercomputer on the TOP500 list to exceed two exaflops of sustained double-precision performance using only CPUs.
The previously unlisted system reached around 80 percent of its theoretical peak performance of 2.736 exaflops.
TOP500 organiser Dr. Jack Dongarra described the system as impressive and noted that China had advanced beyond the previous leader without relying on GPUs.
Unlike several other leading supercomputers, LineShine does not use GPUs to accelerate its workloads.
The machine is built around custom 304-core processors and contains a total of 13.79 million cores running at 1.55GHz.
A proprietary interconnect links the processors across the system.
The CPU-focused design allowed China to build the leading machine despite restrictions affecting its access to advanced foreign technology.
LineShine consumes approximately 42.2 megawatts of power. It delivers an energy efficiency rating of 52.07 gigaflops per watt.
Although El Capitan remains more power-efficient at 60.94 gigaflops per watt, LineShine now leads it in overall computing performance.
The latest ranking includes five supercomputers that have crossed the one-exaflop threshold.
China has one of the five systems, while the United States has three and Germany has one.
El Capitan now ranks second at 1.809 exaflops. Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory moves to third place with 1.353 exaflops.
Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory remains fourth with 1.012 exaflops, while Germany’s JUPITER Booster ranks fifth at exactly one exaflop.
The latest TOP500 list shows that manufacturers are taking several different approaches to high-performance computing.
The leading systems use a mixture of Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and custom Chinese technology. Their designs include CPUs, GPUs, accelerated processing units, and other specialised hardware.
TOP500 said no single technology currently dominates the highest levels of supercomputing.
China has often kept details about its supercomputing projects private because of government restrictions.
However, LineShine was reportedly developed without public funding, allowing its designers to submit the system for TOP500 testing.
Its developers have not disclosed which company manufactured the processors or which chip-production technology was used.
Get the latest tech news, telecom insights, and product launches wherever you prefer.
Add ProPakistani to Preferred Sources and see more of our stories in Google Search and Top Stories.
Shares
