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El Capitan no longer leads the TOP500: China’s LineShine became No. 1 in the June 2026 ranking with 2.198 exaflops on HPL, while El Capitan fell to No. 2 at 1.809 exaflops. El Capitan still leads HPL-MxP mixed-precision performance, so the old “top 10 unchanged” headline is no longer accurate.

The headline was accurate for the November 2025 TOP500 list, when El Capitan retained first place after recording a revised 1.809-exaflop HPL result. The latest available list as of August 18, 2026, is the 67th TOP500 edition, announced on June 23, 2026.

Key takeaways

  • LineShine is the June 2026 TOP500 leader with 2.1984 exaflops on HPL, approximately 21.5% ahead of El Capitan’s 1.809 exaflops.
  • El Capitan moved from No. 1 to No. 2, and the June 2026 top 10 is not unchanged: LineShine entered at No. 1, JUPITER Booster reached No. 5, and Alps entered at No. 10.
  • El Capitan remains No. 1 on HPL-MxP mixed-precision performance at 16.7 exaflops, while LineShine leads HPCG at approximately 22.00 petaflops.
  • The June 2026 list contains five exascale-class systems: LineShine, El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora, and JUPITER Booster.
  • TOP500 ranking measures a system’s result on the HPL benchmark; it does not establish the best system for every scientific application, the lowest operating cost, or the highest availability.

What changed in the El Capitan supercomputer lead?

LineShine displaced El Capitan in the latest TOP500 ranking. The June 2026 TOP500 list placed LineShine at No. 1 with an HPL result of 2.198 exaflops and El Capitan at No. 2 with 1.809 exaflops.

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LineShine’s measured result is 389.4 petaflops higher than El Capitan’s and approximately 1.215 times El Capitan’s HPL performance. The gap is roughly 21.5%, but that percentage should not be treated as a guaranteed 21.5% application speedup: HPL is one standardized workload, not a universal model of scientific or AI performance.

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The change also corrects the claim that the top 10 lineup is unchanged. LineShine entered directly at No. 1, JUPITER Booster became Europe’s first exascale system at No. 5, and Alps entered the top 10 at No. 10.

How did El Capitan’s ranking change over time?

El Capitan’s position changed because the TOP500 lists reflect new or updated benchmark submissions. The chronology also shows why a headline can become stale quickly.

Date TOP500 result El Capitan detail
November 2024 El Capitan debuted at No. 1 1.742 exaflops on HPL; 11,039,616 reported cores
June 2025 El Capitan retained No. 1 It also submitted an HPCG result of approximately 17.41 petaflops
November 2025 El Capitan retained No. 1 New or remeasured HPL result of 1.809 exaflops; No. 1 on HPCG at approximately 17.41 petaflops
June 23, 2026 LineShine took No. 1 El Capitan remained at 1.809 exaflops on HPL and moved to No. 2

The El Capitan system record lists the system’s progression from 1.742 exaflops and 11,039,616 cores in the 2024 and June 2025 entries to 1.809 exaflops and 11,340,000 cores in the November 2025 and June 2026 entries.

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The November 2025 result was the source of the earlier “El Capitan extends its supercomputer lead” framing. The 66th TOP500 announcement recorded El Capitan’s No. 1 position and described JUPITER as Europe’s first exascale system. The June 2026 list changed the overall order.

What is the current TOP500 top 10?

The following table uses the June 2026 TOP500 ranking and measured HPL results. PFLOPS means petaflops; 1,000 petaflops equals 1 exaflop.

Rank System Location or operator HPL result
1 LineShine National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China 2,198.40 PFLOPS / 2.198 EFLOPS
2 El Capitan DOE/NNSA/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, United States 1,809.00 PFLOPS / 1.809 EFLOPS
3 Frontier Oak Ridge National Laboratory, United States 1,353.00 PFLOPS / 1.353 EFLOPS
4 Aurora Argonne National Laboratory, United States 1,012.00 PFLOPS / 1.012 EFLOPS
5 JUPITER Booster Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany 1,000.00 PFLOPS / 1.000 EFLOPS
6 HPC7 Eni, Italy 571.50 PFLOPS
7 Eagle Microsoft Azure, United States 561.20 PFLOPS
8 HPC6 Eni, Italy 477.90 PFLOPS
9 Fugaku RIKEN, Japan 442.01 PFLOPS
10 Alps Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, Switzerland 434.90 PFLOPS

These positions and scores come from the full June 2026 TOP500 table. The list has five systems at or above one exaflop: LineShine, El Capitan, Frontier, Aurora, and JUPITER Booster.

How large is LineShine’s lead over El Capitan?

LineShine leads El Capitan by 389.4 petaflops on HPL, or approximately 21.5%. LineShine’s HPL result is 2.1984 exaflops, compared with El Capitan’s 1.809 exaflops.

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The result is significant for the specific benchmark used to order TOP500, but the result does not prove that LineShine is 21.5% faster for every workload. Scientific applications vary in their use of floating-point arithmetic, memory bandwidth, network communication, storage, synchronization, and accelerators.

What does HPL measure?

HPL, or High-Performance Linpack, measures how quickly a supercomputer solves a dense system of linear equations using floating-point arithmetic. HPL is useful for comparing large-scale system integration and sustained performance on a standardized dense-matrix workload.

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HPL does not directly measure every scientific application, AI training or inference, memory bandwidth across all access patterns, system availability, queue times, operating cost, reliability, or performance on sparse and irregular workloads. The TOP500 benchmark documentation provides the relevant context for interpreting measured and theoretical performance.

For that reason, “fastest supercomputer” needs a qualifier. The precise current statement is: LineShine is the fastest system on the June 2026 TOP500 HPL ranking.

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Which system leads HPCG and HPL-MxP?

Other benchmarks produce a different picture. LineShine leads HPCG, while El Capitan leads HPL-MxP mixed-precision performance.

Benchmark June 2026 leader Relevant results What the benchmark emphasizes
HPL LineShine LineShine: 2.1984 EFLOPS; El Capitan: 1.809 EFLOPS Dense linear algebra and floating-point throughput
HPCG LineShine LineShine: approximately 22.00 PFLOPS; El Capitan: 17.406 PFLOPS; Fugaku: approximately 16.00 PFLOPS Memory access and communication patterns that can be less favorable to systems optimized for dense matrix operations
HPL-MxP El Capitan El Capitan: 16.7 EFLOPS; Aurora: 11.6 EFLOPS; Frontier: 11.4 EFLOPS; LineShine: 7.92 EFLOPS Mixed-precision performance relevant to AI and some accelerated scientific workloads

The June 2026 HPCG results place El Capitan at No. 2 with 17.406 petaflops, behind LineShine and ahead of Fugaku. The June 2026 benchmark highlights place El Capitan first on HPL-MxP at 16.7 exaflops.

HPCG can better reflect some memory- and communication-intensive workloads than HPL, but HPCG is not universally more realistic for every application. HPL-MxP is valuable for examining mixed-precision capability, but HPL-MxP leadership is not the same as overall TOP500 leadership.

What is El Capitan’s hardware and mission?

El Capitan is installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and is associated with the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Nuclear Security Administration, and LLNL. The TOP500 system record identifies its manufacturer as HPE, its architecture as HPE Cray EX255a, and its interconnect as HPE Cray Slingshot-11.

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Specification El Capitan detail
CPU AMD fourth-generation EPYC, 24 cores at 1.8 GHz
Accelerator AMD Instinct MI300A accelerated processing unit
Interconnect HPE Cray Slingshot-11
Operating environment TOSS
Reported cores 11,340,000
Measured HPL result 1,809.00 petaflops
Theoretical peak, or Rpeak 2,821.10 petaflops
Reported power draw Approximately 29,685 kW
Reported energy efficiency Approximately 60.94 gigaflops per watt

The AMD Instinct MI300A combines CPU and GPU elements in a unified package. That design helps explain why El Capitan is strong on accelerated and mixed-precision measurements, but hardware branding alone cannot predict an application’s final performance.

El Capitan supports Lawrence Livermore’s national-security and scientific-computing work, including National Nuclear Security Administration stockpile-stewardship activities. El Capitan is not a generally available commercial cloud server or a product that ordinary customers can rent through a public signup page.

LLNL’s March 2026 getting-started guidance describes Flux-based execution, MI300A GPU modes, node architecture, and allocation procedures. The guidance also warns that memory placement matters: poor binding between a GPU and memory attached to another socket can cause severe slowdowns, with some microbenchmarks running up to 30 times slower.

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What does LineShine represent?

According to the June 2026 TOP500 material, LineShine is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen and was built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center. TOP500 lists a custom LingKun platform, 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, a proprietary LingQi interconnect, Kylin OS, and 13,789,440 reported cores.

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TOP500 provides less public technical documentation for LineShine than is available for U.S. Department of Energy systems. The ranking establishes LineShine’s measured HPL result and reported system specifications; it does not, by itself, establish that every component is domestically manufactured, that the system has broader scientific output, or that LineShine is superior on every workload.

What do Rmax and Rpeak mean?

Rmax is measured benchmark performance. Rpeak is a theoretical peak calculated from system specifications and advertised clock rates, so Rpeak is not a measured application result.

Rmax is the number that orders the standard TOP500 list. Rpeak can help show how much of a system’s theoretical capability a benchmark reached, but readers should not compare Rpeak values as though they were directly observed throughput. TOP500 notes that Rpeak calculations use advertised CPU clock rates and that turbo behavior affects how efficiency should be interpreted.

Does a higher TOP500 score mean lower cost or better efficiency?

No. A higher HPL score does not automatically mean lower operating cost, better performance per watt, greater reliability, or better production utilization.

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El Capitan’s reported power measurement is approximately 29,685 kW, or about 29.7 megawatts. The system’s approximately 60.94 gigaflops-per-watt figure adds an efficiency context, but power figures and benchmark scores do not capture all cooling, facility, storage, networking, staffing, maintenance, or scheduling costs. A benchmark submission also does not tell readers how consistently a system performs during ordinary production operation.

Energy efficiency should be assessed with the separate Green500 ranking and with workload-specific measurements. A system selected for dense linear algebra may not be the most economical choice for a memory-bound simulation, an irregular graph workload, or an AI inference service.

What does the June 2026 ranking not prove?

  • It does not prove that LineShine is best for every application. LineShine leads HPL and HPCG but trails El Capitan on HPL-MxP.
  • It does not prove that El Capitan is obsolete. El Capitan remains No. 2 on HPL, No. 2 on HPCG, and No. 1 on HPL-MxP.
  • It does not measure public access. El Capitan is a controlled national-laboratory resource rather than an ordinary commercial cloud instance.
  • It does not measure queue times or availability. A high benchmark score does not tell a researcher when resources will be available.
  • It does not measure software quality or scientific output. Application portability, compiler support, libraries, data movement, and parallel scaling can determine practical results.
  • It does not establish broad technological independence. A TOP500 submission demonstrates benchmark performance, not complete semiconductor supply-chain independence or overall national capability.
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Why does benchmark leadership matter?

The June 2026 result marks China’s return to the top of the standard TOP500 ranking after El Capitan’s period at No. 1. The United States still occupies the next three positions with El Capitan, Frontier, and Aurora, while JUPITER gives Europe its first exascale-class entry.

The five exascale-class systems also show why a single ranking is no longer enough to describe the high-performance-computing race. HPL rewards one type of numerical throughput; HPCG exposes different memory and communication behavior; HPL-MxP highlights mixed-precision capability that matters to AI and accelerated computing.

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The practical lesson for infrastructure watchers is to ask three questions: Which benchmark produced the result? Was the result newly measured or carried forward? Does the target workload resemble the benchmark’s computation, memory access, communication, and precision requirements?

How should readers describe El Capitan now?

The accurate description as of August 18, 2026, is that LineShine is the current HPL-ranked No. 1 system and El Capitan is No. 2. El Capitan remains the HPL-MxP leader and a highly capable exascale-class national-laboratory system.

“El Capitan is still the world’s fastest supercomputer” is too broad. “El Capitan extends its supercomputer lead” describes the November 2025 result, not the latest June 2026 ranking. The next TOP500 edition could change the order again, so every future report should identify the list edition and benchmark.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is El Capitan still the world’s fastest supercomputer?

El Capitan is not the current No. 1 system on the standard TOP500 HPL benchmark. The June 2026 list ranks China’s LineShine first at 2.198 exaflops and El Capitan second at 1.809 exaflops, although El Capitan remains No. 1 on HPL-MxP.

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Which supercomputer is No. 1 in the June 2026 TOP500 ranking?

LineShine is No. 1 in the June 2026 TOP500 ranking, with an HPL result of 2.1984 exaflops. The system is installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, China.

Can ordinary customers rent time on El Capitan?

El Capitan is a controlled Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory resource for authorized national-laboratory and research users, not a normal commercial cloud server with public signup and consumer pricing.

What is the difference between HPL, HPCG, and HPL-MxP?

HPL measures dense floating-point linear-algebra performance, HPCG emphasizes memory access and communication patterns, and HPL-MxP measures mixed-precision performance. The June 2026 leaders differ: LineShine leads HPL and HPCG, while El Capitan leads HPL-MxP.

The Bottom Line

Bottom line: The latest available TOP500 ranking does not show El Capitan extending its overall lead, and the top 10 lineup is not unchanged. LineShine is No. 1 on HPL at 2.198 exaflops, El Capitan is No. 2 at 1.809 exaflops, and El Capitan still leads HPL-MxP at 16.7 exaflops. The ranking is meaningful, but it is a benchmark result—not a universal verdict on usefulness, cost, efficiency, or scientific value.

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