Chinese system retakes top spot in global supercomputer ranking

WASHINGTON: A Chinese supercomputer has been named the world’s fastest, ending a run of almost 10 years in which US systems held the top position in the TOP500 ranking.

The latest list was unveiled at the ISC computing conference in Hamburg, Germany, where China’s LineShine system was placed first. It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese machine has led the ranking, which has been issued twice a year since 1993 and is widely seen as a benchmark for the relative strength of major computing powers.

According to the ranking, LineShine is based in Shenzhen and achieved a sustained performance of 2.2 exaflops, a measure of the number of calculations a computer can carry out in one second. The machine was built entirely with processors designed in China, rather than the US-made chips used in most of the world’s leading supercomputers.

LineShine displaced the US Department of Energy’s El Capitan system, which is installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, to second place. The United States still holds three of the top four positions on the list, while Germany’s JUPITER Booster is also included among the top five systems.