LineShine Debuts at No. 1 as the TOP500 Enters a New Global Exascale Era | TOP500
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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.
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.
Rank<br>System<br>Site<br>Country<br>HPL (Exaflop/s)
LineShine<br>National Supercomputer Center, Shenzhen<br>China<br>2.198
El Capitan<br>Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory<br>United States<br>1.809
Frontier<br>Oak Ridge National Laboratory<br>United States<br>1.353
Aurora<br>Argonne National Laboratory<br>United States<br>1.012
JUPITER Booster<br>Jülich Supercomputing Centre<br>Germany<br>1.000
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.
A New Entrant and a Reshuffled Top 10
Eni S.p.A.’s new HPC7 system enters the list directly at No. 6 with 571.5 Petaflop/s, built on the same HPE Cray EX255a / AMD Instinct MI300A architecture as El Capitan, and becomes the most powerful machine in Eni’s HPC fleet alongside its existing HPC6 system. Microsoft’s Azure-based Eagle system falls to No. 7 at 561.2 Petaflop/s, followed by HPC6 at No. 8 (477.9 Petaflop/s). Japan’s Fugaku holds No. 9 at 442 Petaflop/s, and Switzerland’s Alps system rounds out the Top 10 at No. 10 with 434.9 Petaflop/s. Finland’s LUMI and Italy’s Leonardo, No. 9 and No. 10 last edition, fall just outside the new Top 10 at No. 11 and No. 12, respectively.
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. The list demonstrates that there is no single dominant technology path to leadership-class computing; instead, vendors are pursuing a variety of CPU, GPU, APU, and custom-accelerator approaches coupled with different interconnect and system designs.
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...