{"id":758950,"date":"2026-06-25T08:15:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T08:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/758950\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T08:15:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T08:15:20","slug":"china-takes-us-crown-for-worlds-fastest-supercomputer-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/758950\/","title":{"rendered":"China takes US crown for world\u2019s fastest supercomputer | Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

China has displaced the United States on an influential ranking of the world\u2019s fastest supercomputers, underscoring Beijing\u2019s growing capability to compete with the world\u2019s leading superpower in cutting-edge technology.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s LineShine is the most powerful system on the planet, overtaking the US-based El Capitan, according to the biannual ranking announced in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of list<\/p>\n

LineShine, located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, achieved a performance of 2.198 exaflops, carrying out more than 2 quintillion calculations per second \u2013 a 20 percent lead over El Capitan, according to the latest TOP500 list.<\/p>\n

LineShine\u2019s position marks the first time a Chinese system has topped the list since Sunway TaihuLight did so in 2017.<\/p>\n

El Capitan, based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, had ranked as the top-performing system since November 2024.<\/p>\n

Frontier at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, ranked third, followed by Aurora at the Argonne National Laboratory in Downers Grove Township, Illinois, and Jupiter at the Julich Supercomputing Centre in Julich, Germany.<\/p>\n

Other countries represented in the top 20 included the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland.<\/p>\n

Jack Dongarra, an emeritus professor of computer science at the University of Tennessee who is one of the organisers of the TOP500 list, said LineShine\u2019s performance showed China to be capable of holding its own in advanced computing despite US export restrictions on the most advanced chips.<\/p>\n

\u201cExport controls may slow China\u2019s access to certain advanced components, but they also provide a strong incentive to develop domestic alternatives,\u201d Dongarra told Al Jazeera, adding that he was \u201cnot entirely surprised\u201d that China had taken the lead.<\/p>\n

\u201cLineShine suggests that China has responded through large-scale investment and hardware-software codesign,\u201d Dongarra said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the longer term, controls may both constrain China and accelerate its efforts to become technologically self-sufficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SC\"The HPE Cray Supercomputing GX5000 is on display at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, on June 16, 2026 [Caroline Brehman\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

Unlike other supercomputers, LineShine runs entirely on general-purpose central processing units (CPUs), which have fewer processing cores and are slower at performing complex tasks than the graphics processing units (GPUs) indispensable to running artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT and Claude.<\/p>\n

LineShine is the first and only system to achieve more than 2 exaflops in performance using a CPU-only design, according to the TOP500 list.<\/p>\n

The list has been published twice yearly since 1993 when computer scientists Erich Strohmaier and Hans Meuer first compiled statistics on supercomputers around the world in preparation for a conference on the topic.<\/p>\n

The list\u00a0ranks supercomputers\u2019 performance using the LINPACK Benchmark,\u00a0which measures the amount of time it takes to solve a dense system of linear equations.<\/p>\n

China-based supercomputers once dominated the list, taking up nearly half the spots in 2019, but Chinese participation in the ranking dwindled in recent years amid souring relations between Washington and Beijing.<\/p>\n

While the TOP500 list has been influential for decades, some experts consider the project to have become less relevant in recent years due to changes in computing processes since the advent of AI.<\/p>\n

Although corporate tech giants such as Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Alphabet are at the forefront of today\u2019s advances in AI, the TOP500 list is largely made up of government and academic initiatives that volunteered to participate in the ranking.<\/p>\n

In a 2015 paper, researchers at Cornell University estimated that El Capitan achieved only 22 percent of the computational performance of xAI\u2019s Colossus supercomputing facility in Memphis, Tennessee.<\/p>\n

Dongarra said the ranking assessed \u201cone benchmark\u201d and should not be viewed as a \u201ccomplete measure of technological leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cScientific application performance, energy efficiency, software maturity, reliability, ease of use and the ability to support a broad research community are equally important,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Addison Snell, cofounder of the computing industry consultancy Intersect360 Research, said he was not surprised by LineShine\u2019s capabilities but it was noteworthy that Chinese developers had begun to re-engage with the ranking project.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ranking of LineShine as the world\u2019s top supercomputer should have a ripple effect in the US, Europe and Japan as countries continue to vie for AI dominance,\u201d Snell told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe US still leads globally in terms of technology, but the gap is not wide,\u201d Snell added.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith the rapid pace of evolution, the global order could change quickly. Digital sovereignty is one of the key topics discussed in supercomputing and AI today, and every region is working to deploy its own resources and capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ColossusWorkers at Elon Musk\u2019s xAI facility, which houses a large supercomputer known as Colossus, used for Artificial Intelligence data processing, in Memphis, Tennessee, the US, on September 11, 2025 [File: Karen Pulfer Focht\/Reuters]<\/p>\n

China and the US have been locked in a fierce battle for global supremacy in leading technologies such as AI over the past decade, rolling out a slew of tit-for-tat sanctions and export controls to blunt each other\u2019s advances.<\/p>\n

The 2026 AI Index Report, released in April by Stanford University, found that China had \u201ceffectively closed\u201d the AI model performance gap with the US.<\/p>\n

While the US produces more top-of-the-line AI models, China holds the advantage in rolling out patents and industrial robot installations, the report said.<\/p>\n

Intersect360 Research\u2019s Snell that while hyperscalers such as Amazon and Microsoft would be able to the claim the top spots on the TOP500 list if they wanted to, the ranking remained an important indicator of the capabilities of supercomputers used for scientific applications.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a mistake to assume \u2018AI dominance\u2019 will automatically translate to \u2018science dominance,’\u201d Snell said.<\/p>\n

\u201cConsumer applications like image generation, translation, or chatbots have relevance to high-end computing but are not sufficient in of themselves,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cPolicy should reflect \u2018AI for science,\u2019 not \u2018AI or science.\u2019 To enable AI for science, governments must invest in both halves.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China has displaced the United States on an influential ranking of the world\u2019s fastest supercomputers, underscoring Beijing\u2019s growing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":758951,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,77,64,63,512,164,105,1055,6075],"class_list":["post-758950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-asia-pacific","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-china","tag-economy","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-us-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=758950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/758950\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/758951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=758950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=758950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=758950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}