LineShine in Shenzhen, China, has been declared the world's most powerful supercomputer, debuting at the top of the TOP500 rankings announced Tuesday. This marks the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped the list, which is often viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess.
Located at China’s National Supercomputing Center, LineShine achieved 2.198 exaflops, meaning it can perform more than 2 quintillion calculations per second. The system is key to developing models used in artificial intelligence. Unlike many high-performance computers that use graphics processing units, LineShine runs entirely on conventional computer chips, or CPUs. It relies on approximately 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate.
LineShine displaced the previously top-ranked U.S. computer, El Capitan, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which now ranks second. Other U.S. supercomputers at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois follow, while Germany's Jupiter supercomputer has dropped to fifth place. These five systems are the only publicly verified exascale computers in the world.