The Chinese Society of Computer Science recently released its annual ranking of the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in China, revealing a cautious approach to disclosing the nation’s actual computational capabilities. Mirroring last year’s list, the 2024 roundup omits any mention of China’s purported ExaFLOPS-class systems. Perhaps more notably, the list shows no introduction of new systems since last year, with only slight increases in cumulative power from minor updates. This pattern suggests a strategic decision by Chinese organizations to keep their highest-performing systems under wraps, possibly to sidestep further U.S. restrictions.

The three leading supercomputers in China for 2024 remain unchanged from the previous year, all featuring hybrid CPU + GPU architectures. The most powerful system on the list, first deployed in 2023, boasts 15,974,400 CPU cores and achieved a peak Linpack score of 487.94 PFLOPS. Although this system surpasses Japan’s Fugaku, which delivers 442 FP64 PetaFLOPS, it still falls short of American ExaFLOPS-class machines such as El Capitan (1.742 ExaFLOPS), Frontier (1.353 ExaFLOPS), and Aurora (1.012 ExaFLOPS).

The second most powerful Chinese supercomputer, launched in 2022, features 460,000 CPU cores and a Linpack peak of 208.26 PFLOPS. The third-ranked system has 285,000 CPU cores, delivering up to 125.04 PFLOPS of performance.

Comparing the total performance of China’s top 100 supercomputers in 2023 and 2024 reveals only a trivial increase, from 1.398 ExaFLOPS to 1.406 ExaFLOPS. This negligible growth indicates a year of minimal advancements in the public supercomputing landscape in China.

However, these official rankings might not fully represent the extent of China’s supercomputing capabilities. According to Jack Dongarra, a prominent figure in the supercomputing community and a co-founder of Top500.org, China reportedly possesses at least three ExaFLOPS-class systems, with performances ranging from 1.3 to 1.7 ExaFLOPS, based on domestically designed hardware, as well as a 2 ExaFLOPS system utilizing x86 processors from Hygon. While these claims have not been verified, Dongarra’s insights are generally respected within the industry.

Details on the exact specifications of China’s elite supercomputers remain undisclosed by the Chinese Society of Computer Science, likely to obscure the origins of the hardware used in these systems. Industry analysts often speculate about the potential hardware configurations and their suppliers. It is believed that many of these high-performing machines utilize standard CPU and GPU components acquired via unofficial channels, although some of the top 10 systems are powered by China’s own processors and accelerators.