A supercomputer in China now outranks its US counterparts as the world’s most powerful, marking the first time since 2017 that a Chinese computer has topped a list sometimes viewed as a measure of a nation’s technological prowess.
The LineShine computer in Shenzhen, China, displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the latest version of the TOP500 ranking announced Tuesday. It was the Chinese computer’s debut on the list.
Scientists behind the TOP500 project said the LineShine computer at China’s National Supercomputing Centre achieved 2.198 exaflops, meaning it can perform more than 2 quintillion calculations per second.
El Capitan, at the US government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, now ranks second, ahead of two other US supercomputers at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois. Dropping to fifth place is the Jupiter supercomputer in Germany. The 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. It relies on approximately 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate, according to TOP500.
