Chinese supercomputer leapfrogs best US machines to be ranked world’s fastest

A supercomputer in China now outranks its US counterparts as the world’s most powerful. It is 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 displaced top-ranked US computer El Capitan in the Top500 rankings released on Tuesday. It was LineShine’s debut on the list. China’s LineShine differs from other high-performance computers in that it runs entirely on conventional computer chips (CPUs), instead of the graphics processors (GPUs), commonly used for AI. It requires about 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate, according to the list. Supercomputers, which are more than 1,000 times faster than a regular computer, can be used to hunt for medical breakthroughs, model climate systems, simulate nuclear explosions, predict human behaviour and perform virtual weapons testing. Scientists involved in the Top500 project said LineShine 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 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. …