A Chinese supercomputer has topped global rankings for speed for the first time.
The machine, called LineShine, placed first in the TOP500, a twice yearly ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers. It was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center and is located at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzen. It consists of 13.79 million computing cores, built into 304-core LX2 processors.
LineShine's elevation pushes the previous winner, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan, which is housed in California, down to second place.
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Originally conceived as part of a supercomputer meeting in Mannheim, Germany, in 1993, the TOP500 list has been released every six months since then, and has generally been dominated by U.S. supercomputers. With contributions by computer scientists, supercomputer manufacturers and the public, the rankings are based on how well the machines fare in running a software package called the High-Performance Linpack (HPL), which involves conducting as many calculations within a series of complex algorithms as possible in a single second. This metric, expressed in exaflops, is the measure of how powerful the supercomputer is. A single exaflop is the equivalent of one quintillion (or a billion billion) operations per second.
LineShine clocked in at 2.198 exaflops per second, but it can theoretically run even faster, with an estimated peak of 2.736 exaflops per second, according to the TOP500.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory claims that its supercomputer, El Capitan, is capable of 2.821 exaflops per second, but the machine posted a mere 1.809 exaflops per second in this edition of the TOP500.
The top five rankings were rounded out by two other U.S. machines, and another supercomputer located in Germany. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier, in Tennessee, was measured performing 1.353 exaflops per second, just ahead of the Illinois-based Argonne National Laboratory’s Aurora, which posted 1.012 exaflops a second. German research institution Julich Supercomputing Centre’s JUPITER Booster conducted an even one exaflop per second.
As powerful as these supercomputers are, they could one day face major competition from quantum computers. Comparing a classical machine and a quantum computer is difficult, however, as the two operate on completely different principles. Quantum computers, unlike traditional supercomputers, are not limited to binary calculations, making exaflops per second an irrelevant metric. And some quantum computing researchers have already claimed their machines are performing calculations billions of times faster than even the fastest supercomputers.
