On June 23, at the International Supercomputing Conference, a machine almost no one had heard of vaulted to the top of computing’s most-watched scoreboard. LineShine, housed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, clocked 2.198 exaflops on the High Performance Linpack benchmark — more than 20 per cent faster than the United States’ El Capitan at 1.809. It is the first Chinese system to top the TOP500 since Sunway TaihuLight in 2017, and the first machine ever to cross two exaflops using only general-purpose CPUs, no GPUs.

That last detail is the story. China did not win by buying the best chips; it was barred from doing so. LineShine runs on a fully domestic stack — custom 304-core LX2 processors built on the Arm architecture, a proprietary LingQi interconnect, the homegrown LingKun platform and Kylin OS, across nearly 13.8 million cores. Beijing stopped submitting to the TOP500 as Washington’s export controls bit; re-entering the summit is a deliberate signal that the chokehold did not work as intended.

Link: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/sovereignty-silicon-subsidies-china-taiwan-washington-10779081/