China is back on top of world supercomputing. The new LineShine supercomputer, built in Shenzhen, has become number 1 on the TOP500 list, the benchmark ranking of the most powerful computers on the planet. It’s the first time in nine years that China has submitted a system to this list, and it has done so in style: with a computer that runs exclusively on processors of its own design, without the need for graphics accelerators.
What’s special about LineShine? To give you an idea of its power, this supercomputer can perform 2.2 trillion operations per second. It has more than 13 million processing cores (yes, you read that right: 13 million) and consumes 42 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a small city. But the most striking thing is not just its raw power, but the fact that its processors —called LX2— were designed and manufactured entirely in China, using the ARM architecture (the same one used by the processors in many phones and tablets). Each chip has 304 cores working at once, a figure that boggles the mind compared to the 8 or 16 cores of a normal computer processor.
And why should we care? Because supercomputers aren’t just a matter of national pride or records. They’re used for things that affect our everyday lives: predicting the weather more accurately, designing new materials and medicines, simulating climate change, or developing artificial intelligence. China returning to the supercomputing race means technological competition between countries intensifies, and that usually translates into faster advances that eventually also reach the computers and devices we use daily. Moreover, the fact that LineShine is also first on the HPCG benchmark (a test that measures performance on real problems, not just theoretical ones) proves it’s not a “flash in the pan”, but a genuinely useful system for science.
— Marta, for intermittent intelligence.
