On the occasion of the SC20 conference, Cerebra Systems, in collaborations with researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), showed that its latest single wafer-scale Cerebras CS-1 could outperform one of the fastest supercomputers in the U.S. by more than 200 times.<\/p>\n
The Cerebras CS-1 is the worlds first wafer-scale computer system. It is 26 inches tall, fits in a standard data center rack, and is powered by a single Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) chip. It is the worlds largest chip, measuring 72 square inches (462 cm2) and the largest square that can be cut from a 300 mm wafer. All processing, memory, and core-to-core communication occur on the wafer. In total, there are 1.2 trillion transistors in an area of 72 square inches.<\/p>\n
The wafer holds almost 400,000 individual processor cores, each with its private memory and a network router. The cores form a square mesh. Each router connects to the routers of the four nearest cores in the mesh. The cores share nothing; they communicate via messages sent through the mesh.<\/p>\n
Cerebras CS-1 will be used especially for scientific research and science-related projects. The machine can solve a large, sparse, structured system of linear equations of the sort that arises in modeling physical phenomena like fluid dynamics using a finite-volume method on a regular three-dimensional mesh. Solving these equations is fundamental to such efforts as forecasting the weather; finding the best shape for an airplanes wing; predicting the temperatures and the radiation levels in a nuclear power plant; modeling combustion in a coal-burning power plant; and making pictures of the layers of sedimentary rock in places likely to contain oil and gas.<\/p>\n
To achieve such results, Cerebras says there are three factors that enable the computers speed, including the CS-1s memory performance, high bandwidth and low latency of the on-wafer communication fabric, and processor architecture optimized high-bandwidth computing. <\/p>\n
In return, of course, you have a chip about 60 times the size of a large conventional chip like a CPU or GPU. It was built to provide a much-needed breakthrough in computer performance for deep learning.<\/p>\n
The researchers used the CS-1 to do sparse linear algebra, typically used in computational physics and other scientific applications. Using the wafer, they achieved a performance more than 200 times faster than that of NETLs Joule 2.0 supercomputer. NETLs Joule is the 24th fastest supercomputer in the U.S. and 82nd fastest on a list of the worlds top 500 supercomputers. It uses Intel Xeon chips with 20 cores per chip for a total of 16,000 cores.<\/p>\n
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Cerebras CS-1 supercomputer uses the worlds largest chip - Inceptive Mind<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the occasion of the SC20 conference, Cerebra Systems, in collaborations with researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), showed that its latest single wafer-scale Cerebras CS-1 could outperform one of the fastest supercomputers in the U.S. by more than 200 times. The Cerebras CS-1 is the worlds first wafer-scale computer system. Continue reading