China displaces US for world’s fastest supercomputer crown

A Chinese machine has seized the title of world’s most powerful supercomputer, ending nearly a decade of US dominance and underscoring Beijing’s drive to build advanced computing power with homegrown technology.

The system, called LineShine, topped the closely watched TOP500 ranking unveiled Monday at the major computing ISC conference in Hamburg, Germany.

It is the first time since 2017 that a Chinese supercomputer has led the list, which has been published twice a year since 1993 and serves as an informal scoreboard for the world’s computing superpowers.

LineShine knocked the previous champion, the US Energy Department’s El Capitan, into second place.

Located in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, the machine hit a sustained speed of 2.2 “exaflops” — a measure of how many calculations a computer can perform each second.

Crucially, LineShine was built entirely with Chinese-designed processors, rather than the US-made chips that power most of the world’s top systems.

The United States still claims three of the top four spots, with El Capitan, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, coming in at second place.

Out of Europe, Germany’s JUPITER Booster rounds out the top five.

AFP