China’s LineShine becomes world’s most powerful supercomputer

A Chinese supercomputer has topped the global TOP500 ranking, ending nearly a decade of US dominance in the list of the world’s fastest computing systems.

The system, called LineShine, was ranked first in the latest TOP500 list released at the ISC computing conference in Hamburg, Germany.

It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese supercomputer has led the ranking. The TOP500 list has been published twice a year since 1993 and is widely followed as a benchmark for global high-performance computing.

LineShine replaced the US Energy Department’s El Capitan as the world’s most powerful supercomputer. El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, moved to second place.

The Chinese system is located in Shenzhen and achieved a sustained speed of 2.2 exaflops, a measure of the number of calculations a computer can perform each second.

LineShine was built entirely with Chinese-designed processors, instead of the US-made chips used in many of the world’s leading supercomputing systems.

The development highlights China’s push to expand advanced computing capacity using domestic technology.

Despite losing the top position, the US retained three of the top four places in the ranking.

Germany’s JUPITER Booster was the highest-ranked European system and rounded out the top five.