China has reclaimed the world’s fastest supercomputer crown for the first time since 2017, according to the latest TOP500 rankings released at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany, on Tuesday.LineShine, built by the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, achieved 2.198 exaflops of performance – nearly 2.2 quintillion calculations per second – surpassing the previous champion, El Capitan, at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which reached 1.809 exaflops.It is also the first supercomputer to exceed two exaflops using only central processing units (CPUs), without relying on graphics processing units (GPUs) that power most of today’s leading supercomputers.“This is the first…