Despite trade sanctions, China has regained the title of world’s fastest supercomputer for the first time since 2018. Lineshine has ousted El Capitan from number one in the TOP500 rankings. This is despite strict limits on US companies selling high-powered computing components to China, which top the list, with the US occupying three of the top five spots. Lineshine does not use any GPUs, which are typically the backbone of modern supercomputers.
While reaching the top of the Top500 obviously carries bragging rights, it also serves as a message from the Chinese government to the US. The Trump administration has sought to limit China’s access to chips from companies like NVIDIA and imposed heavy tariffs on products moving in and out of the country. China responded by producing more readily available and generalized CPUs. Lineshine uses approximately 45,000 LX2 processors, each with 304 cores running at 1.55GHz, connected by a special high-speed, low-latency network called LingQi.
Lineshine is the first supercomputer to break the 2,000 exaflop barrier and is 20 percent faster than El Capitan, the number two system on the Top500 list. However, it also uses 42.2 MW, which is dramatically more and less efficient than El Capitan’s 29.7 MW.
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