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Supercomputing China

China Reclaims Fastest Supercomputer At 2 Exaflops (reuters.com) 50

Posted by BeauHD from the taking-the-crown dept.
Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from TOP500: The 67th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was announced today at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany. LineShine, a previously unlisted system installed in China, debuts at No. 1, displacing El Capitan as the world's most powerful supercomputer as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. LineShine achieved 2.198 Exaflop/s on HPL -- about 80 percent of its 2.736 Exaflop/s theoretical peak -- making it the first system on the TOP500 to exceed two exaflops of sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only.

Installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) and built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center, the system is based on a custom Chinese processor and the "LingKun" platform: 13.79 million cores across 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, linked by the proprietary LingQi interconnect and running Kylin OS. LineShine draws approximately 42.2 megawatts of power, for an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops/Watt. Its debut marks the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system has led the TOP500, and it also takes over the No. 1 position on the HPCG ranking with 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s. On the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark, LineShine reached 7.92 Exaflop/s for fourth place, a comparatively modest 3.6x speedup over its HPL score that points to a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision accelerators. While impressive, "the results may say more about Beijing's desire to show self-sufficiency in computing systems than its standing in the global AI race," reports Reuters.

Reuters interviewed tech and policy experts who said that the results "do not mean that China has the world's fastest computer for AI work because of changes in the computing industry in recent years and the methods used to compile the list." The reports notes that LineShine "ranked fourth on a benchmark test designed to simulate computing work that is more similar to AI."

Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California's Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, said: "If the hyperscalers submitted their systems, this 'world's fastest' would not crack the top five." Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, a firm that focuses on supercomputers, added: "I'm not surprised it's the number one system. What I'm surprised by is that they submitted it and want recognition for it."

China Reclaims Fastest Supercomputer At 2 Exaflops More | Reply

China Reclaims Fastest Supercomputer At 2 Exaflops

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  • US water cooled super computer (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @06:19PM (#66206748)

    The obvious choice is to build a super computer under the reflecting pool. Using the amazing pumps and clean water to provide algae-free computing and beating both China and Russia. USA USA USA

    Thank you for your attention in this matter.

    • You kid, but algae is a real problem for watercooled systems. That is the last place where people should be sourcing water for a watercooling rig.

      • You kid, but algae is a real problem for watercooled systems. That is the last place where people should be sourcing water for a watercooling rig.

        A) Pretty sure that's the joke.

        B) You think algae is a problem, but there are other biological issues even in dark-only water based cooling systems. There's a reason those systems usually end up pumped full of chemicals.

  • Chinese Tech (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Tuesday June 23, 2026 @06:47PM (#66206798)
    Seems like China as not as dependant on US technology as the US thought

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 )

      Seems like China is not as dependent on US technology as the US [hoped].

      FTFY

    • Yay they just beat a two year old supercomputer using tech from 2022.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      They have lots of cheap, clean energy to run it too.

      Anyone have details of the CPUs? What architecture are they? Domestic Chinese CPUs have been using MIPS and RISC V, but also ARM and some licensed x86 designs.

      • Re:Chinese Tech (Score:5, Informative)

        by excelsior_gr ( 969383 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @07:13AM (#66207402)
        "LineShine uses semi-custom 304-core LX2 processors based on the Armv9 instruction set architecture running at 1.55GHz. The LX2 appears to have been co-designed with China's National Supercomputing Center and Huawei, with 40,960 chips deployed across 92 cabinets. It has a total of 13,789,440 cores." From: https://www.datacenterdynamics... [datacenterdynamics.com]

      • It's LineShine which is apparently ARM based.

        Sounds broadly similar to Fukagu in general high level design: ARM CPUs driving very fast very wide on-cpu SIMD units. Sounds like they have a mix of HBM and DDR which is interesting. Also given the reported numbers (peak vs max), I'd expect their custom interconnect is on die like the Tofu one.

        It looks generally pretty good.

      • But are probably just burning North Korean coal anyway.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Probably not. Coal use for electricity is declining in China, and last year new renewable generation equalled the entire output of all generation (including coal) in Germany. The have a massive amount of cheap, clean energy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      They haven't been for over a decade. For a while, Chinese supercomputers mostly used Intel Xeon Phi chips as compute elements. The US banned exporting those chips to China, so they started making their own HPC chips. Sunway TaihuLight was the world's fastest supercomputer for two years (2016 to 2018), using Chinese technology.

  • not everyone has been suckered by the AI hype.

  • In America all those pesky "experts" building that capacity will be fired and replaced by partisan sycophants who, despite being wholly unqualified, will undoubtedly build systems so much better that you'll get tired of having such powerful systems.

  • still fast (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fortunatus ( 445210 ) on Wednesday June 24, 2026 @01:41AM (#66207160)
    who cares whether it is the fastest for AI workloads? there are plenty of other workloads. this machine is fastest at HPL benchmarks - and that represents important applications. frankly, i /am/ interested it is made with home grown cpus and interconnects.

  • ...is that the custom made CPU can execute only NOPs [wikipedia.org] (either direct or indexed).

    • I mean they kinda did since they're talking about Exaflops not exanops.

    • If it wasn't disclosed, how did you figure it out? Were they hiding it, or was it just not applicable, and therefore not worth mentioning, in relation to this use case?

      When I talk about my 1998 Miata I don't mention it was bad at hauling gravel.

  • â¦can it run Crysis?

  • I think it is interesting to state that Rpeak is still higher for El Captain, and the latter efficiency even considering Rmax is higher: https://top500.org/lists/top50... [top500.org]

    So I am curious on this huge discrepancy between Rmax and Rpeak for El Captain.

  • So far as CPU and GPU compute is concerned, the US's best are already good enough. They reached that point with their latest machines. Further progress will be made in different forms of compute. China has basically won the first p***ing contest to take place after the last important 'supercomputer arms race' battle was won by the US. Just my humble opinion as Mr 987. I've been watching this race since the Stone Soupercomputer and before the term Beowulf Cluster was born. (Before time... before slashdot use

  • Does it play Crysis?

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