TOP500 Supercomputer List: China Returns to the Top, Europe Holds Strong Position
The latest edition of the TOP500 ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers has brought a change at the top. China's LineShine has overtaken the United States' El Capitan, while the number of exascale systems has increased to five. Europe has maintained its position among the world's leading high-performance computing regions.
The 67th edition of the TOP500 list ranks the world's most powerful supercomputers based on their computing performance. This year's ranking introduces a new leader: China's LineShine, installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen. The TOP500 list measures performance in exaflops (EFLOPS), representing the ability to perform one quintillion (10¹⁸) floating-point operations per second.
China's LineShine achieved 2.198 exaflops in the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, becoming the first supercomputer in TOP500 history to exceed two exaflops of sustained performance using only CPUs. It is also the first Chinese system to top the ranking since 2017. LineShine is based on China's domestically developed LingKun architecture, features more than 13.7 million processing cores, and uses the proprietary LingQi interconnect.
El Capitan, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, dropped to second place. The HPE Cray EX255a system delivered 1.809 exaflops in the HPL benchmark. It features 11.34 million cores, fourth-generation AMD EPYC processors with 24 cores running at 1.8 GHz, AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators, and the Cray Slingshot 11 interconnect. Its energy efficiency reaches 60.94 gigaflops per watt.
Frontier, operating at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, remains in third place with an HPL performance of 1.353 exaflops. The system is based on the HPE Cray EX235a architecture and uses third-generation AMD EPYC processors with 64 cores clocked at 2 GHz. It incorporates a total of 9,066,176 cores and also relies on the Cray Slingshot 11 network.
Aurora, installed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, retained fourth place with an HPL score of 1.012 exaflops. Built by Intel on the HPE Cray EX – Intel Exascale Compute Blade architecture, Aurora combines Intel Xeon CPU Max Series processors with Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators connected through the Cray Slingshot-11 interconnect.
Europe remains competitive
Europe has maintained its place among the global HPC leaders thanks to JUPITER Booster, which ranks fifth with an HPL performance of 1.000 exaflop. The system is Europe's first exascale supercomputer. Installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, it operates on Eviden's liquid-cooled BullSequana XH3000 platform powered by NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips.
Despite this achievement, Europe still trails the new Chinese leader LineShine (2.198 exaflops) as well as the three leading U.S. systems: El Capitan (1.809 exaflops), Frontier (1.353 exaflops), and Aurora (1.012 exaflops).
The 67th TOP500 edition confirms that the global race in supercomputing has become primarily a competition between the United States and China. China has regained the top position with LineShine, marking the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system leads the ranking. At the same time, the United States remains the dominant force in high-performance computing, with three of the world's five fastest supercomputers—El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora—operating in U.S. national laboratories.
Asia beyond China ranks lower
Other Asian countries also appear in the ranking, although further down the list. Japan continues to maintain a strong position thanks to its advanced research infrastructure and long-standing expertise in supercomputing. However, following the end of Fugaku's dominance, the Japanese system now ranks ninth and is no longer competing for first place.
South Korea's highest-ranked system, Nipa, is placed 20th, while Taiwan's Nano ranks 33rd. Both countries operate modern HPC centers that primarily support the semiconductor, electronics, and artificial intelligence industries. Nevertheless, their systems are currently outside the world's top tier in terms of raw computing performance.
The latest TOP500 edition marks a new phase in the global supercomputing race. For the first time, exascale systems are operating simultaneously in China, the United States, and Europe, with the world's fastest machine built entirely on domestically developed Chinese technology. For Europe, maintaining the EuroHPC programme will be crucial to preserving competitiveness, while for Poland the key challenge remains building computing infrastructure capable of competing in the highest league of exascale computing.
