logo
logo
  • Product
    • Cloud
    • Cluster
      • Andromeda
    • System
    • Processor
    • Software
  • Applications
    • Natural Language Processing
    • Computer Vision
    • High-Performance Computing
    • Industries
      • Health & Pharma
      • Energy
      • Government
      • Scientific Computing
      • Financial Services
      • Web and Social Media
  • Resources
    • Customer Spotlights
    • Blog
    • Publications
    • Events
    • White Papers
  • Developers
    • Community
    • Developer Blog
    • Documentation
    • Cerebras Model Zoo
    • Request Access to SDK
  • Company
    • About
    • In the News
    • Awards
    • Press Releases
    • Press Kit
  • Join Us
    • Life at Cerebras
    • All openings
  • Get Demo
  • Search
November 27, 2019
In Archived

A successful week for Cerebras at Supercomputing 2019

Hello everyone! We are overwhelmed by the interest and support we received for our flagship CS-1 product announcement at Supercomputing […]

Hello everyone! We are overwhelmed by the interest and support we received for our flagship CS-1 product announcement at Supercomputing last week. And we remain grateful to Argonne National Lab for being our first customer and sharing the story of both the workloads they are accelerating with the CS-1 and their datacenter deployment experience.

We had a fantastic turn out at Supercomputing – the booth was bustling all day, every day! We enjoyed hosting and answering questions from interested parties about the features of the CS-1, and the whys and hows of the engineering challenges overcome in building it.

  • The CS-1 at our Supercomputing Booth
  • Members of the Cerebras Team at our Supercomputing Booth
The Cerebras Supercomputing Booth

Our co-founder Jean-Philippe Fricker and I also relished the opportunity to deliver a technical talk on the lessons we learned when designing, engineering and deploying the CS-1.

The 4 key lessons we talked about were:

  1. Packaging – with the Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) being the industry’s first-ever wafer-scale integrated chip, we found that traditional packaging techniques weren’t up to the task. Thermal expansion mismatch, power delivery and heat removal were critical problems to solve. And we did so by deploying a special connector between the PCB and WSE, fan-out I/Os on the edges of the wafer. Cross scribe-line die-to-die interconnect was a key innovation in allowing us to get to wafer-scale.
  2. Power Delivery – The WSE consumes 15kW of power at peak. While this sounds like a lot, on a per rack-unit basis, the power density is the same as that of a standard rack server CPU, or GPU. Still, solving for this was challenging because traditional methods such as delivering power from the periphery, power regulators and multi-stage power conversion topologies were not going to provide the necessary efficiency. We solved this by placing converters on the opposite side of the PCB, universal high-voltage AC to 54V DC, and direct conversion from 54V to 0.9V. And we did this with standard IEC C20 16A power inlets, and PSU redundancy built in!
  3. Cooling – Of course, cooling a 15kW chip is no joke either! Its large surface prevents the use of traditional cooling. We found phase change cooling methods to be impractical. The aforementioned thermal expansion mismatch between the PCB and wafer was crucial to solve for as well. The CS-1’s cooling solution utilizes a combination of internal, closed-loop water-based coolant, delivered by a set of hot-swappable redundant pumps, and a set of hot-swappable fans that blow cold air over a heat exchanger to cool the internal coolant. The result is that the CS-1 fits within any standard datacenter’s capabilities.
  4. Data I/O – The WSE’s compute resources require a constant stream of high-speed data. To be specific, an I/O bandwidth of 1.2Tbit/s is necessary to keep it busy. A single server can’t supply data fast enough to feed this rate. The CS-1 manages connections with an on-board local CPU. Data is ingested via 12x 100Gb Ethernet links hooked up to any standard datacenter switch, to on-board optical transceivers which terminate at an FPGA, which transfers this data to the WSE.

The result of overcoming all these challenges is that Cerebras was able to solve the problem of wafer-scale compute for the first time in the history of the chip design industry. And we did so while fitting within the capabilities of any datacenter. As such, the Cerebras CS-1 is the world’s fastest AI compute solution, a full system packaged with robust software that meets users where they are. It is the only comprehensive solution for the vast, and growing, compute requirements of the Deep Learning workload.

It was heartwarming to see a room full of our industry peers and answer their questions after the talk. We’ve since received several notes of praise for the talk and are truly appreciative. Take a look at our slides here.

My colleague Natalia Vassilieva and I also enjoyed participating in several Birds of a Feather sessions at SC. We enjoyed all our planned and unplanned meetings with past and future collaborators, and look forward to kicking off a successful year of partnerships and growth ahead.

The Cerebras talk at Supercomputing 2019

All in all, it was a very successful outing for Cerebras! We would love to hear from you – please reach out if you have any questions or are interested in learning more about how the CS-1 suits your Deep Learning needs.


Ugnius
Author posts
Related Posts
Whitepaper

March 24, 2023

Training Giant Neural Networks Using Weight Streaming on Cerebras Wafer-Scale Systems


by Rebecca Lewington

Homepage

March 22, 2023

Cerebras introduces Sparse-IFT, a new technique to increase accuracy for the same compute


by Rebecca Lewington

Publication

March 22, 2023

Sparse-IFT: Sparse Iso-FLOP Transformations for Maximizing Training Efficiency


by Rebecca Lewington

Add comment Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

  • Prev
  • Next

Explore more ideas in less time. Reduce the cost of curiosity.

Sign up

info@cerebras.net

1237 E. Arques Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94085

Follow

Product

Cluster
System
Chip
Software
Cloud

Applications

Natural Language Processing

Computer Vision

High Performance Computing

Industries

Health & Pharma
Energy
Government
Scientific Computing
Financial Services
Web & Social Media

Resources

Customer Spotlight
Blog
Publications
Event Replays
Whitepapers

Developers

Community
Developer Blog
Documentation
ML Public Repository
Request Access to SDK

Company

About Cerebras
In the News
Press Releases
Privacy
Legal
Careers
Contact

© 2023 Cerebras. All rights reserved

Privacy Preference Center

Privacy Preferences

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}