China unveils LineShine supercomputer in Shenzhen with CPU-only design

In short: China announced a new supercomputer called LineShine in Shenzhen and said it can reach 2 exaflops using only CPUs, but the claim is not yet confirmed by a public benchmark list.

What happened

China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen unveiled a new supercomputer called LineShine, also reported as Lingsheng. Chinese media described it as built entirely with domestic parts, meaning it is intended to avoid relying on foreign hardware and software.

Reports say LineShine is designed to reach 2 exaflops of performance. An exaflop is a measure of speed, meaning about one quintillion calculations per second (like doing a billion billion math problems every second). If that number is confirmed in the usual public tests, it would be higher than the current top verified result from the United States, El Capitan, which measured 1.742 exaflops on a standard test called Linpack (a widely used “speed test” for supercomputers).

LineShine is also notable for what it does not use. Multiple reports say it has no GPU accelerators, which are special chips often used to speed up AI work. Instead, it relies on central processing units, or CPUs, across the whole system. The reported design includes about 47,000 CPUs across 92 compute cabinets, and it is meant to handle both traditional scientific computing and AI workloads.

Why it matters

Supercomputers help with things like weather forecasts, drug research, and training AI systems. LineShine also signals that China is trying to build very large computing systems with parts it can make at home, especially as access to some foreign chips has become harder.

Source: NYTimes