China targets top spot in supercomputing with fully domestic, CPU-only machine

Known as Lingsheng or LineShine, it is designed to reach 2 exaflops – or two quintillion calculations per second – edging past the 1.8-exaflop El Capitan, the current record holder at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Unlike other exascale supercomputers, which rely on graphics processing units (GPUs), LineShine will run entirely on central processing units (CPUs).

It uses 47,000 CPUs across 92 compute cabinets, according to its chief designer Lu Yutong from the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China’s southern tech hub.

Huang Xiaohui, the centre’s deputy director, told a conference in Shenzhen on April 24 that LineShine had achieved full-stack independence, from underlying hardware to core software, as a fully domestic supercomputer.

“By the end of 2025, we completed full system deployment and activation, with sustained performance exceeding 2 exaflops. Its performance has already surpassed that of the United States’ El Capitan, returning China to the world’s No 1 position,” she said in remarks broadcast by Shenzhen TV, a city broadcaster.

Huang said LineShine used the world’s most powerful CPUs and adopted an integrated architecture that supported both traditional high-performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.