China's LineShine supercomputer in Shenzhen has been declared the world's most powerful, marking the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped the TOP500 ranking. Announced Tuesday, the computer's debut on the list displaces the previously top-ranked U.S. computer, El Capitan. The ranking is often viewed as a measure of a nation's technological prowess.
Located at China’s National Supercomputing Center, LineShine achieved 2.198 exaflops, allowing it to perform more than 2 quintillion calculations per second. El Capitan, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, now ranks second, followed by two other U.S. supercomputers in Tennessee and Illinois. Germany's Jupiter supercomputer has dropped to fifth place. These five are the only publicly verified exascale computers in the world.
LineShine differs from other high-performance computers by running entirely on conventional computer chips, or CPUs, instead of the graphics processors, or GPUs, commonly used for artificial intelligence. Despite this, the system is key to developing AI models. According to TOP500, the supercomputer relies on approximately 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate.