China's LineShine declared world’s fastest Supercomputer
In another significant technological achievement for China, its ‘LineShine’ has been named the world’s fastest supercomputer at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) underway in Hamburg, Germany
In another significant technological achievement for China, its ‘LineShine’ has been named the world’s fastest supercomputer at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) underway in Hamburg, Germany.
LineShine surpassed the US-built El Capitan, marking the first time since 2017 that a Chinese machine has topped the TOP 500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
According to the rankings released on Tuesday, LineShine, developed by the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, can perform nearly 2.2 quintillion (billion billion) calculations per second.
"Major step forward"
LineShine outperformed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan by more than 20% in a key benchmark. The American system had held the top spot in the twice-yearly TOP500 rankings since November 2024.
"China’s fully domestically developed “LineShine” supercomputer ranked first on the global TOP500 list with a sustained double-precision performance of 2.19EFlops (10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second)," Chinas's Global Times reported citing the ISC 2026.
"Chinese experts said the achievement represents more than a performance milestone", Global Times said.
Supercomputers are used for complex scientific tasks ranging from climate modeling and human brain simulations to cryptography and advanced research.
The experts said LineShine’s breakthrough and practical applications mark a major step forward for China’s supercomputing industry in overcoming foreign technological constraints and building an independent, controllable hardware and software ecosystem.
"Another Distinguishing Feature"
LineShine also stands out for relying entirely on standard Central Processing Units (CPU) rather than the Graphics Processing Units (GPU) used by most leading supercomputers.
At the heart of the system are China's self-developed LX2 processors, which support both traditional computing and AI workloads. The chips incorporate China's first domestically developed high-bandwidth memory, enabling data to move about 10 times faster than in conventional CPUs.
“This is the first time a computer with only CPUs has reached exascale,” TOP500 co-founder and Turing Award winner Jack Dongarra told the South China Morning Post, referring to the milestone of performing at least 1 quintillion calculations per second.
The achievement marks China's return to the top of global supercomputing after nine years—a major milestone in high-performance computing and technological innovation.
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