China's supercomputer overtakes US and Germany to become world's most powerful

 China's supercomputer overtakes US and Germany to become world's most powerful

A Chinese supercomputer has overtaken its American competitors to top the list of the world's most powerful 500 supercomputers. This is the first time a Chinese computer has topped the list since 2017. The list is often seen as an important indicator of a country's technological prowess and competitive strength.

The Lineshine supercomputer in Shenzhen, China, has replaced the top-ranked American computer El Capitan in the list of 'Top 500 Projects' released on Tuesday. This is the first entry of the Chinese computer in this list. According to scientists from the Top 500 Project, the Lineshine computer at China's 'National Supercomputing Center' has achieved a speed of 2.198 'exaflops'. That is, it can perform more than 2 quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second.

El Capitan, located at the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has now fallen to second place. Two other US supercomputers, located at national laboratories in Tennessee and Illinois, are in third and fourth place. Similarly, Germany's Jupiter supercomputer is in fifth place.

These are the five publicly certified exascale computers in the world. However, Lineshine is different from other high-performance computers. It is powered entirely by traditional computer chips, or CPUs, instead of the graphics processors (GPUs) typically used for artificial intelligence (AI). According to the Top 500, this supercomputer requires about 42.2 megawatts of electricity to operate.