Nearly ten years later, China’s supercomputer has once again reached the pinnacle of global performance.
According to The Guardian, the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, released the latest TOP500 list of the world's top supercomputers on June 23 local time. The Chinese domestically developed supercomputer "LineShine" topped the list, surpassing the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s supercomputer El Capitan.
This is the second time in China's supercomputer history that a machine has topped this list, which is often used to measure a country's scientific and technological strength, following the "Sunway Taihu Light" in 2017.
According to reports, the difference between “Ling Sheng” and other high-performance computers lies in its design, which uses only CPUs (standard microprocessors). It does not employ any advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips such as GPUs. Most of the world’s top supercomputers rely on heterogeneous architectures that combine CPUs and GPUs. In the TOP500 list, GPUs account for more than 55% of the total computational power, which is used for intensive numerical calculations. In terms of energy efficiency, the rated power consumption of “Ling Sheng” is 42.2 MW, with an energy efficiency index of 52.07 GFlops/W.
In the overall computing power evaluation, "Lingxing" ranked first with a score of 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s in the high-performance conjugate gradient benchmark tests. In the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark test, which is designed for artificial intelligence applications, "Lingxing" achieved a speed of 7.92 Exaflops per second, ranking fourth.
"Ling Sheng" CCTV News
Supercomputers have a computing speed that is more than 1000 times faster than ordinary computers. They can be used to achieve medical breakthroughs, model climate systems, simulate nuclear explosions, predict human behavior, and conduct virtual weapon tests.
Scientists involved in the "Top500" project said that LingSheng's measured sustained performance reached 2.198EFLOPS, making it the world's first supercomputer with sustained performance exceeding 200 billion FLOPS. This means that for every second LingSheng works, 7 billion people would need to calculate for 10 years.
The “Chieftain Rock” currently ranks second, ahead of two other American supercomputers located in national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois. Ranked fifth is the German supercomputer “Jupiter”. Other countries that are among the top ten include Italy, Switzerland, Finland, and Japan.
Top 500
Last year, the European Union announced a plan costing 20 billion euros, aimed at building bases equipped with powerful supercomputers to develop next-generation artificial intelligence models. Europe is trying to catch up with the United States and China.
These AI “superfactories” will aim to achieve “moon landing-style” innovation in fields such as healthcare, biotechnology, industry, robotics, and scientific discoveries.
The EU strategic document indicates that the supercomputers in the most powerful AI factories can accommodate up to 25,000 advanced AI processors, and the number of AI processors in these 'super factories' will exceed 100,000.
A European Union official said that these facilities with high electricity consumption may require a large amount of water for cooling. Therefore, it is necessary to use green energy as much as possible, and plans are in place to recycle the water used. Activists are worried that these data centers, with their high electricity consumption, could disrupt Europe’s climate goals.
According to CCTV reports, 'Lingsheng' is a domestically developed full-stack integrated infrastructure aimed at scientific, engineering, and intelligent computing applications. Since its system deployment, 'Lingsheng' has supported applications in various fields such as atmospheric and oceanic sciences, engineering simulation, materials science, drug discovery, brain science, scientific AI, and large model inference. It enables mixed-precision computing, workflow management, and complex multi-task parallel operation, and has achieved world-class application results.
"Ling Sheng"'s computing power has reached a pinnacle, and its application results have marked a breakthrough in China's supercomputing field, enabling the establishment of an independent and controllable software and hardware system. This has provided a solid computational foundation for scientific breakthroughs, industry innovation, and the high-quality development of industries in China.
