South Korean Media: China Reclaims World’s No. 1 Title in Supercomputing After 9 Years, Marking a Revival!
On July 4, South Korean media outlet *Choice Economy* published an article stating that China has reclaimed the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer after nine years.
Recently, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) held in Hamburg, Germany, the latest TOP500 rankings were unveiled, naming "Lingsheng"—developed by Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center—as the world’s most powerful supercomputer.
Lingsheng achieved a computing performance of 2.198 exaflops, surpassing the previous top-ranked El Capitan from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States, which reached 1.809 exaflops. One exaflop refers to computational power exceeding 100 quintillion operations per second.
This achievement marks China’s return to the pinnacle of global supercomputing for the first time since the “Sunway TaihuLight” in 2017, after a nine-year gap.
The standout feature of Lingsheng is that it is the world’s first supercomputer capable of achieving exascale performance using only pure CPUs, without relying on GPUs.
Jack Dongarra, co-founder of TOP500 and recipient of the Turing Award, commented: “This is the first computer to achieve exascale computing performance using CPUs alone.”
Currently, most of the world’s highest-performing supercomputers adopt hybrid architectures combining CPUs and GPUs. In particular, GPUs serve as core components in both artificial intelligence and supercomputing fields—and are also one of the primary targets of U.S. export controls on advanced technologies to China.
Dongarra stated: “Despite U.S. export restrictions, China has proven it can develop autonomous technologies that are not only comparable to but even superior to existing ones.”
Lingsheng has already been applied across various research domains, including climate modeling, engineering simulation, new drug development, neuroscience research, and artificial intelligence.
The Shenzhen National Supercomputing Center assessed that this supercomputer “has achieved breakthroughs not only in benchmark performance but also in practical applications,” and that it “has made historic progress in overcoming foreign technological constraints by building an independent hardware and software ecosystem.”
This result is seen as a symbolic milestone, indicating that even under U.S. export restrictions on advanced semiconductors, China has made significant strides in developing indigenous supercomputing technology based on CPUs.
Original Source: toutiao.com/article/1869754648972292/
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