AI compute company Cerebras Systems and Argonne National Laboratory have announced that Argonne is the first national laboratory to deploy the Cerebras CS-1 system, which is reportedly the the fastest AI computer system in existence. The computer integrates the Wafer Scale Engine, reportedly the largest and fastest AI processor ever built.
By removing compute as the bottleneck in AI, the CS-1 enables AI practitioners to answer more questions and explore more ideas in less time. The CS-1 delivers high performance and scale to AI compute, and its deployment across national laboratories enables the largest supercomputer sites in the world to achieve 100- to 1,000-fold improvement over existing AI accelerators, according to Cerebras.
“We’ve partnered with Cerebras for more than two years and are extremely pleased to have brought the new AI system to Argonne,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences, in a statement. “By deploying the CS-1, we have dramatically shrunk training time across neural networks, allowing our researchers to be vastly more productive to make strong advances across deep learning research in cancer, traumatic brain injury and many other areas important to society today and in the years to come.”
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Argonne deployed the CS-1 to enhance scientific AI models. Its first application area is cancer drug response prediction, a project that is part of a DOE and National Cancer Institute collaboration aimed at employing advanced computing and AI to solve challenge problems in cancer research. Adding Cerebras CS-1 supports efforts to extend Argonne’s major initiatives in advanced computing, which also leverages the AI capabilities of the Aurora exascale system expected in 2021.
Argonne’s deployment of the CS-1 is the first part of a multi-laboratory partnership between the DOE and Cerebras Systems. Cerebras has also partnered with DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to accelerate its AI initiatives and enhance its simulation strengths with the machine learning capabilities of the CS-1.
The Cerebras CS-1 contains the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), reportedly the industry’s only trillion transistor processor. The WSE measures 46,225 square millimeters in area, 56.7 times larger than the largest graphics processing unit. It contains 78 times more AI optimized compute cores, 3,000 times more high speed, on-chip memory, 10,000 times more memory bandwidth, and 33,000 times more communication bandwidth.