The International Supercomputer Conference in Hamburg was the perfect platform for Lineshine (or Língshèng 灵晟) to shine, as it was awarded the crown of the most powerful computer ever built in the world.
It broke the previous TOP500 record held by El Capitan, the American supercomputer built in 2024 by HPE for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Unlike the latter, Lineshine uses solely CPU power rather than APU or GPU, a notable feat given the prevalence of these technologies. Only one other supercomputer in the top 10, the Arm-powered Fugaku supercomputer, falls into that category.
Details shared by Lu Yutong, the chief designer of Lineshine, show that it is powered by over 13.7 million ARMv9 cores spread across 90 racks and 45,360 CPUs.
Yes, you got it right, there are 304 cores per socket divided into two chiplets and eight NUMA domains each with 38 cores and 4 GB of HBM memory. There appear to be eight empty CPU slots per rack.
Each socket can access 256GB of DDR5 memory, meaning the entire system has 128TB of RAM and 16TB of HBM. The entire supercomputer has 11.6 PB of traditional DDR5 memory and almost 1.5 PB of HBM.
Compared to the El Capitan’s pure HBM3 approach, Lineshine opted for a staggered memory set similar to traditional computers (which use RAM and SSD). The system is also connected to 200 PB of direct storage.
Impressive performance
In total, Lineshine reached 2,198 exaflops, 21% faster than the 1,809 exaflops achieved by El Capitan.
However, numbers don’t tell the whole story; China’s new leader consumes much more energy than El Capitan, making it much less efficient. It only reached 52 Gigaflops/Watt compared to 60.95 Gigaflops for El Capitan and 73.28 for Kairos, the greenest supercomputer in operation.
What is more interesting is the fact that each core, even running at 1.5 GHz, reached about 200 Gigaflops of FP64. Significantly more than any supercomputing CPU core (e.g. AMD Zen 4 or Nvidia Grace), which ironically underlines the Chinese weakness when it comes to the GPU, i.e. they went the CPU route because they had no choice but to resort to brute force.
And that’s despite the flurry of Huawei launches in recent years with the Ascend 910D, Ascend 910C and Ascend 920.
Lineshine used its own version of Nvidia’s Nvlink interconnect called LinQi, one that can scale to over 100,000 nodes or over 60 million cores, 4 times the current number of cores. Therefore, there is a lot of room to grow if Lineshine wants to maintain its rank.
It is not the first time that China has topped the TOP500 ranking. It last achieved this with the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in 2017. And while taking the top spot in this ranking gives the winner bragging rights, it is only really useful for HPC (high-performance computing) applications such as CFD, earthquake simulation, materials, energy, drug design, neuroscience and scientific artificial intelligence, and others.
Hyperscalers like Google or Microsoft can muster even more powerful computing power, at least by an order of magnitude, if necessary, but that is not included in the TOP500 for several reasons.
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