LineShine Tops TOP500: New Exascale Era Begins in 2026

LineShine Debuts at No. 1 as the TOP500 Enters a New Global Exascale Era

HAMBURG, Germany — June 23, 2026 — The 67th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was announced today at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany. LineShine, a previously unlisted system installed in China, debuts at No. 1, displacing El Capitan as the world's most powerful supercomputer as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. The new list also reflects continued depth in U.S. and European exascale capability, a new entrant in Italy's HPC fleet, and unchanged leadership atop the Green500 energy-efficiency ranking.

LineShine Takes the No. 1 Position

LineShine achieved 2.198 Exaflop/s on HPL — about 80 percent of its 2.736 Exaflop/s theoretical peak — making it the first system on the TOP500 to exceed two exaflops of sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only. Installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) and built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center, the system is based on a custom Chinese processor and the 'LingKun' platform: 13.79 million cores across 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, linked by the proprietary LingQi interconnect and running Kylin OS. LineShine draws approximately 42.2 megawatts of power, for an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops/Watt. Its debut marks the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system has led the TOP500, and it also takes over the No. 1 position on the HPCG ranking with 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s. On the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark, LineShine reached 7.92 Exaflop/s for fourth place, a comparatively modest 3.6x speedup over its HPL score that points to a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision accelerators. The rise of Chinese supercomputing signals a major shift in global HPC leadership.

Five Systems Now Cross the Exascale Threshold

LineShine's debut increases the number of systems sustaining more than one exaflop/s on HPL from four to five and, for the first time, places exascale systems across Asia, North America, and Europe simultaneously.

El Capitan, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, drops to No. 2 but is otherwise unchanged at 1.809 Exaflop/s, 11.34 million cores, and 60.94 Gigaflops/Watt, built on the HPE Cray EX255a architecture with AMD 4th Gen EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. Frontier, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, moves to No. 3 at 1.353 Exaflop/s, and Aurora, at Argonne National Laboratory, holds No. 4 at 1.012 Exaflop/s. JUPITER Booster, operated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, moves to No. 5 at exactly 1.000 Exaflop/s, remaining Europe's only system above the exascale threshold on HPL. The European exascale computing initiative continues to gain momentum with JUPITER's achievement.

Architectural and Vendor Diversity in the Top 10

The June 2026 Top 10 illustrates an unusually high degree of architectural diversity, reflecting the increasingly heterogeneous nature of high-performance computing. The systems span custom Chinese architectures (LineShine's LingKun processors and LingQi interconnect), AMD-based systems ranging from exascale (El Capitan and Frontier) to sub-exaflop performance (HPC7 and HPC6), an Intel-based exascale design (Aurora), NVIDIA Grace Hopper architecture (JUPITER Booster and Alps), Microsoft's cloud-based Eagle system combining Intel Xeon processors with NVIDIA H100 accelerators, and Japan's distinctive Fugaku system built around Fujitsu's A64FX Arm processors.

Looking at vendor representation, HPE is the dominant system integrator, supplying six of the ten systems (El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora, HPC7, HPC6, and Alps); Aurora runs on the HPE Cray EX platform but is credited to Intel as prime contractor. On the processor side, AMD has the strongest presence, powering four systems directly (El Capitan, Frontier, HPC7, and HPC6) and contributing more than 40 percent of the combined Top 10 HPL performance. NVIDIA technology appears in three systems (JUPITER Booster, Eagle, and Alps), while Intel is represented both as a complete platform vendor (Aurora) and through Xeon processors in Eagle. Eviden/Bull supplies the BullSequana XH3000 platform underlying JUPITER Booster, Fujitsu remains represented through Fugaku, and China's Shenzhen Supercomputer Center enters the Top 10 with the custom-built LineShine system, demonstrating the emergence of a new indigenous exascale architecture.

HPCG, HPL-MxP, and Green500 Highlights

On the HPCG benchmark, which measures performance on data-intensive, real-world application patterns rather than raw floating-point throughput, LineShine takes over the No. 1 position with 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s, ahead of El Capitan (17.41) and Fugaku, now third (16.00). Frontier holds fourth (14.05), Eni's new HPC7 system takes fifth (5.95), and Aurora rounds out the top six (5.61).

On the HPL-MxP benchmark, which measures mixed-precision performance, El Capitan remains the No. 1 system at 16.7 Exaflop/s, a 9.2x speedup over its standard HPL score. Aurora holds second place (11.6 Exaflop/s, 11.5x speedup) and Frontier holds third (11.4 Exaflop/s, 8.4x), while LineShine debuts in fourth at 7.92 Exaflop/s with a more modest 3.6x speedup, consistent with its CPU-only design.

Energy-efficiency leadership is unchanged from the previous list. KAIROS, at CALMIP / University of Toulouse-CNRS in France, again ranks No. 1 on the Green500 at 73.28 Gigaflops/Watt (3.046 Petaflop/s on HPL), followed by ROMEO-2025 at the ROMEO HPC Center - Champagne-Ardenne, France (70.91 Gigaflops/Watt, 9.863 Petaflop/s) and the Levante GPU extension at DKRZ in Germany (69.43 Gigaflops/Watt, 6.747 Petaflop/s). All three share an identical BullSequana XH3000 architecture built on Grace Hopper Superchips and Quad-Rail NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR200.

FAQ

What is LineShine?

LineShine is a Chinese supercomputer that debuted at No. 1 on the June 2026 TOP500 list, achieving 2.198 Exaflop/s on the HPL benchmark. It is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen and uses custom Chinese processors.

How many exascale supercomputers are there now?

As of June 2026, there are five systems exceeding one exaflop/s on HPL: LineShine (China), El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora (USA), and JUPITER Booster (Germany).

What is the Green500?

The Green500 ranks the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers. As of June 2026, KAIROS in France holds the No. 1 spot with 73.28 Gigaflops/Watt.

Why is LineShine's HPL-MxP speedup modest?

LineShine is a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision accelerators, resulting in a 3.6x speedup on HPL-MxP compared to its HPL score, whereas GPU-accelerated systems like El Capitan achieve 9.2x speedups.

What is the TOP500 list?

The TOP500 project publishes a twice-yearly ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers based on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. It started in 1993.

Sources

This article is based on the official TOP500 press release for the June 2026 list, announced at ISC 2026 in Hamburg, Germany. For more details, visit TOP500.org.