The Shenzhen-based LineShine supercomputer has overtaken the American El Capitan, which now ranks second in the latest Top500 supercomputer rankings, The Guardian reported.
Unlike its U.S. rivals and many other modern supercomputers designed for AI, LineShine runs entirely on conventional CPUs rather than GPUs.
According to the Top500 project, LineShine achieved 2.198 exaflops of performance, enabling it to perform more than two quintillion calculations per second. The machine is located at China’s National Supercomputing Center and requires around 42.2 megawatts of electricity to run.
Supercomputers are used for a variety of purposes, including medical research, climate modeling and nuclear blast simulations. El Capitan, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, is now the highest-ranked US system, followed by two more American supercomputers in Tennessee and Illinois. The fifth-most-powerful computer in the world – JUPITER – is in Germany.
