Cerebras Has the “World’s Fastest AI Computer”

According to the startup Cerebras Systems, the CS-1 is the world’s most powerful AI computer system. It is the latest attempt to create the best supercomputer, and it has been accepted by the U.S. federal government’s supercomputing program. 

The CS-1 uses an entire wafer instead of a chip, and their computer design has many little cores across the wafer. There are over 1.2 trillion transistors across the cores of one wafer, which is a lot more than the 10 million that are often on one chip of a processor. If that wasn’t enough, the CS-1 supercomputer has six of the Cerebras wafers in one system. They are called a Wafer Scale Engine. 

Cerebras’ first CS-1 was sent to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. The 400,000 cores will be used to work on extremely difficult AI computing problems like studying cancer drug interactions. The Argonne National Lab is one of the world’s top buyers of supercomputers. 

The CS-1

The CS-1 is programmable with the Cerebras Software Platform and can be used with existing infrastructure, according to the startup. The Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) has more silicon area than the biggest graphics processing unit, and the 400.000 Sparse Linear Algebra Compute (SLAC) cores are flexible, programmable, and optimized for neural networks. 

The CS-1 has a copper-colored block, or cold plate, that conducts heat away from the giant chip. Pipes of cold water are responsible for cooling, and fans blow cold air to carry heat away from the pipes. 

According to many, the big breakthrough is the dashboard. Argonne has been constantly working on spreading out a neural net over large numbers of individual chips, making them better to program compared to other supercomputer machines like Google’s Pod. 

The Cerebras CS-1 is basically one giant, self-contained chip where the neural network can be placed. A program has been developed to optimize the way math operations of a neural network are spread across the WSE’s circuits. 

According to Rick Stevens, Argonne’s associate laboratory director for computing, environment, and life sciences, “We have tools to do this but nothing turnkey the way the CS-1 is, [where] it’s all done automatically.”

Built From the Ground Up

According to Cerebras, they are the only startup to build a dedicated system from the ground up. In order to achieve its amazing performance, Cerebras optimized every aspect of chip design, system design, and software of the CS-1 system. This allows the CS-1 to complete AI tasks that normally take months in minutes. 

The supercomputer machine also greatly reduces training time, and single image classification can be completed in microseconds. 

According to an interview given to the technology website VentureBeat, CEO of Cerebras Andrew Feldman said, “This is the largest square that you can cut out of a 300 millimeter wafer.” he continued, “Even though we have the largest and fastest chip, we know that an extraordinary processor is not necessarily sufficient to deliver extraordinary performance. If you want to deliver really fast performance, you need to build a system. And you can’t take a Ferrari engine and put it in a Volkswagen to get Ferrari performance. What you do is you move the bottlenecks if you want to get a 1,000 times performance gain.”

After the introduction of the CS-1 system, Cerebras have positioned themselves as one of the leaders in the supercomputer industry. Their contribution will undoubtedly have a major impact in solving some of the world’s most pressing AI challenges. These systems are drastically decreasing the time it will take to tackle many problems.