China's LineShine Supercomputer Claims Top Spot on TOP500 for First Time Since 2017

A Chinese supercomputer has surpassed its U.S. counterparts to become the world's fastest, marking the first time since 2017 that a Chinese machine has topped the prestigious TOP500 ranking. The LineShine supercomputer, located at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen (NSCC-SZ), achieved 2.198 exaflops on the Linpack benchmark, making it the first system to officially exceed 2 exaflops and the fifth verified exascale computer globally.

Unveiled at the ISC26 conference in Hamburg, Germany, LineShine runs entirely on conventional CPUs rather than the graphics processors (GPUs) commonly used for artificial intelligence. Built with approximately 14 million ARMv9 cores across 20,480 nodes, it uses a Chinese-developed LingQi interconnect and is fully composed of domestically manufactured components. The system draws about 42.2 megawatts of power and also took the top spot on the High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) benchmark.

The debut of LineShine pushes previous leaders down the rankings. The U.S. Department of Energy's El Capitan, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, drops to second place with 1.809 exaflops, followed by Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.353 exaflops) and Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory (1.012 exaflops). Germany's JUPITER supercomputer falls to fifth place with 1.000 exaflops. These five are the only publicly verified exascale systems in the world.

China had not submitted a Linpack result for a leadership-class supercomputer since 2017, when the Sunway TaihuLight topped the list. The U.S. imposed sanctions in 2019 restricting China's access to advanced chips, but China continued building supercomputers using domestic technology. LineShine's chief designer, Lu Yutong, had earlier presented details of the system, and the new listing confirms China's growing capabilities in high-performance computing.