China’s National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen announced the Lingshen supercomputer project at a conference on April 24, targeting sustained performance above 2 ExaFLOPS using only CPUs and no foreign-made components.
The system would pack 47,000 processors into 92 compute cabinets, making it the first exascale machine designed to reach that performance tier without GPU accelerators. Lu Yutong, director of the Shenzhen supercomputing center and the system’s chief designer, presented the technical details at the event.
Every other exascale system in operation relies heavily on GPUs or accelerator hardware. The U.S. Department of Energy’s El Capitan, currently the world’s fastest supercomputer, runs on 44,544 AMD MI300A APUs that tightly couple CPU and GPU silicon on a single package. Lingsheng’s CPU-only architecture would represent a fundamentally different approach to reaching exascale throughput.
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Lingsheng’s claimed sustained performance of 2+ ExaFLOPS would, if achieved, exceed El Capitan’s measured Linpack score of 1.809 ExaFLOPS. While El Capitan’s theoretical peak is 2.79 ExaFLOPS, real-world Linpack results are always lower. Obviously, no Linpack or equivalent benchmark data exists for Lingsheng because the system hasn’t been built yet.
China’s claims are at best dubious. On a literal reading of the announcement, China says it might be able to achieve 2+ ExaFLOPS at some point in the future. But El Capitan is already theoretically capable of 2.79 ExaFLOPS, so it’s difficult to see how China’s project is ever going to “cast a new benchmark for global supercomputing,” when it’s unlikely to be running even five years from now.
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