China Retakes Top Supercomputer Ranking From US With GPU-Free System

China has reclaimed the world’s top supercomputer ranking from the US for the first time in nine years.

In the Top500 supercomputer performance rankings released June 23, Shenzhen-based LianShine took the No. 1 spot. It was 20% faster than El Capitan, the California-based US system that had held the top ranking.

LianShine has drawn particular attention because it delivered the best performance using only central processing units, without high-performance graphics processing units. Most supercomputers rely on GPUs. China instead built chips with specialized circuits that accelerate matrix and vector calculations, allowing them to perform the functions typically handled by GPUs. The chips contain about 14 million computing cores, described as small electronic brains.

The result has fueled analysis that US restrictions on Nvidia and AMD GPU exports to China reduced the country’s dependence on GPUs and pushed it to develop a new computer architecture. Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, called CPUs “a loophole” in current regulations. He added that export and manufacturing controls on CPUs for China should also be tightened.

The US has led the supercomputer industry, holding the top spot in the Top500 for 15 of the past 25 years. But China’s rapid rise has raised concerns in Washington. The administration of President Donald Trump launched the Genesis Mission in November last year to sharply expand AI supercomputing capacity through public-private cooperation.

Kim Mi-ri, Hankyung.com reporter mirimiri@hankyung.com