Chinese supercomputer displaces U.S. machines as world’s fastest for first time since 2017

A worker sets up a display at the booth for Sugon, a Chinese supercomputer manufacturer, ahead of the upcoming World Artificial Intelligence Conference held in Shanghai, Wednesday, July 5, 2023.

A supercomputer in China now outranks its U.S. 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 U.S. 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 Center achieved 2.198 exaflops, meaning it can perform more than 2 quintillion calculations per second.

El Capitan, at the U.S. government’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, now ranks second, ahead of two other U.S. 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.