Cerebras Chip Part of Project to Spot Post-exascale Technology – HPCwire

Cerebras Systems has secured another U.S. government win for its wafer scale engine chip which is considered the largest chip in the world.

The companys chip technology will be part of a research project sponsored by the National Nuclear Security Administration to find future computing technologies to assess the nuclear weapons stockpile.

The NNSA and its partners will assess the chips capabilities as part of an initiative to research post-exascale technologies.

The NNSAs Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program is researching technologies that could be 40 times faster than the upcoming exascale system called El Capitan, which will be hosted at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

The U.S. Department of Energy has said that the El Capital supercomputer, which will be the first multi-exaflops system in the U.S., will go online in 2023 or 2024, according to a 25-year ASC accomplishments report published this month. The system is being built by HPE in collaboration with AMD, and Livermore Lab has already taken delivery of three testbed systems.

The Cerebras system could become a part of the Department of Energys program to evaluate experimental systems, which is called Advanced Architecture Prototype Systems. The first AAPS system, called Astra, was a petaflops-system based on Arm processors. A followup system, codenamed Vanguard-2, is currently being built. Development of the next AAPS system, Vanguard-3, will start in 2026, according to the ASC roadmap.

The post-exascale program is also considering quantum computing and other novel hardware, computer architecture, and software; the likely trajectory of relevant hardware and software technologies; and the ability of the U.S. industrial base to meet NNSAs needs, according to the project page.

NNSAs goal is to improve the computing capability of the Stockpile Stewardship Program, which involves the assessment of the current nuclear arsenal. The annual program helps the government simulate and evaluate nuclear weapons without real-world testing. Better computing capabilities will improve the testing capabilities.

The Cerebras wafer-scale engine, which has 850,000 cores and 2.6 trillion transistors, was already being evaluated by the U.S. government. The Argonne National Laboratory, which focuses on scientific research, was assessing Cerebras chip as an alternative to GPUs for artificial intelligence applications. The NNSA and affiliate labs that include Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore are focused on nuclear stockpiles and other weapons technologies. At Livermore, Cerebrass first-generation CS-1 machine was integrated into the NNSAs unclassified Lassen supercomputer in 2020.

As a startup, its extremely difficult to win the trust and get access to the workloads, even to see if youre good at them, Andrew Feldman, CEO of Cerebras, told HPCwire.

The NNSA project allows Cerebras to collaborate with a whole new class of customer, Feldman said.

Cerebras chips have also been used by private sector companies that include GlaxoSmithKline and TotalEnergies. The WSE-2 chip is finding more acceptance in the private and public domain, and the product has matured as more applications are found and AI models mature.

In the software world, they say the first thing to do is get in customers hands. In the hardware world, it takes us years to build chips and get systems. Then we have to get them in customers hands and learn as quickly as we can, Feldman said.

Cerebras chip has made its mark in scientific and research applications, but its not yet in front of corporate customers for everyday use. Google Cloud and AWS have put up instances of their homegrown AI chips for such applications, but Cerebras chip is significantly faster, and can be integrated into high-performance computing workflows.

Were not going to be an exclusive cloud seller. Were going to continue to deliver to customers, who, for whatever reason, also want on premise solutions, Feldman said.

Cerebras would love to partner with major cloud providers, Feldman said, adding you have to earn that. That takes time.

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Cerebras Chip Part of Project to Spot Post-exascale Technology - HPCwire