China has reclaimed the world’s fastest supercomputer crown for the first time since 2017, according to the latest TOP500 rankings released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. LineShine, built by the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, achieved 2.198 exaflops of performance – nearly 2.2 quintillion calculations per second – surpassing the previous champion, El Capitan at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which reached 1.809 exaflops. It is also the first supercomputer to exceed two exaflops using only central processing units (CPUs), without relying on graphics processing units (GPUs) that power most of today’s leading supercomputers. “This is the first time a computer with only CPUs has reached exascale,” TOP500 Co-founder and Turing Award winner Jack Dongarra told the South China Morning Post.
Most exascale systems, including El Capitan, depend heavily on GPUs, which excel at handling many calculations simultaneously. The chips have become a focal point of U.S. efforts to curb China’s advances in AI and supercomputing. “China can adapt to develop its own version of technology as good as – or maybe even better than – existing technology, despite U.S. export controls,” Dongarra said. Speaking at the conference in Hamburg, LineShine Chief Designer Lu Yutong said the system abandoned the conventional CPU-GPU architecture. Instead, it relies on domestically developed processors with built-in AI acceleration, high-speed memory, a proprietary interconnect network, and liquid-cooling technology. The design was intended to support both traditional scientific simulations and AI workloads while improving energy efficiency, she said.
Huang Xiaohui, the Center’s Deputy Director, said in April that LineShine had achieved full-stack independence, from underlying hardware to core software. Since entering service, LineShine has already supported applications ranging from climate modeling and engineering simulations to drug discovery, neuroscience and AI.
“LineShine’s success in both benchmark performance and practical applications marks a historic step forward for China’s supercomputing industry in building an independent hardware and software ecosystem despite foreign technology restrictions,” the Center said. China’s previous TOP500 champion was the Sunway TaihuLight, which debuted at No 1 in 2016 and held the title again in 2017, before being overtaken by the U.S.-built Summit system in 2018. In the years that followed, China’s presence on the list became increasingly opaque. Amid U.S. export restrictions and growing concerns over technology controls, leading Chinese supercomputer manufacturers stopped submitting benchmark results to the TOP500 list. According to the New York Times, LineShine was developed without public funding, allowing its designers to submit the system for TOP500 benchmarking this year, the South China Morning Post reports.
