China took back a coveted computing crown from the United States on Tuesday, ratcheting up a fierce technological competition that has implications for science, national security and geopolitics.
LineShine, a massive computing system in Shenzhen, China, was declared the world’s fastest by a group of researchers using a set of standard tests for supercomputers. Besides raw speed, the system stood out because it uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units, which most high-end supercomputers rely on for heavy number crunching.
That underlying design could point to a better way to blend artificial intelligence with traditional scientific tasks, said Jack Dongarra, an organizer of the so-called Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
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