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On Tuesday, June 23, 2026, the 67th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers was published, and it came with a surprise: the US supercomputer El Capitan, the fastest in the world since November 2024, has lost its primacy.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Now, LineShine is number 1. The exceptional device is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) and was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center. It uses 13.79 million cores and is based on custom Chinese processors.
What is exceptional about LineShine is the number of operations per second it can perform, which is the main measure of the power of a supercomputer. This is represented in exaflops. A "flop" stands for floating point operation per second, or in other words, the number of times it can multiply or add values per second. The exa- prefix stands for a billion billion (1018): that’s the sheer size of values we are working on here.
Assessed by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, LineShine is the first supercomputer to surpass 2 exaflops of sustained double-precision performance on CPUs only. Double-precision – or 64-bit – arithmetic is the main standard for accuracy in simulations.
The supercomputer reached 2.198 exaflops, an exceptional number that is about 80 percent of its theoretical peak performance (i.e. the performance it should be capable of in an instant rather than in a sustained situation) of 2.736 exaflops. You’d need about 1,000,000 iPhone 17 Pro Maxes to match that level of computational power.
El Capitan, located at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LNNL) in California, has a higher peak performance (2.746 exaflops), but its sustained HPL performance is 1.809. There are three other supercomputers on the exascale, two in the United States and one in Germany.
The Frontier supercomputer is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and has a peak of 2.056 exaflops and a sustained performance of 1.353 exaflops. The bronze medal goes to Aurora at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, with a sustained performance of 1.012 exaflops. Both of these facilities are operated by the US Department of Energy.
JUPITER booster, at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, has an HPL of 1 exaflop. This is the only system on the exascale outside China and the US.
The American supercomputers retain their primacy when it comes to the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark. Mixed-precision arithmetic – 16 or 32 bits – is often calculated by graphics processing units (GPUs) and can be accurate enough for tasks like data science and AI at much faster speeds.
El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora remain faster than LineShine in HPL-MxP, but TOP500 states this isn't surprising because LineShine has a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision processors.
The TOP500 list started in 1993, and it is updated annually every June and November with the ranking of the world's most powerful computer system. The last time China was in the top spot was in 2017.
Supercomputers of this caliber are used often for operations that fall under the umbrella of “national security." Developing innovative materials, tracking nuclear stockpiles, and conducting confidential simulations are among the kinds of tasks they might perform.
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