The computer with the largest chip beat the Joule supercomputer in computational speed
The WSE megachip contains 1.2 trillion transistors and almost 400,000 computing cores. Thanks to its unique architecture, it presents a supercomputer on a chip and can easily do it. The CS-1 system with this chip recently playfully defeated the Joule supercomputer in a simulation of power plant combustion processes.
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Megachip WSE vs largest GPU
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About a year ago, California startup Cerebras Systems stunned the world with its unique chip, or rather the entire WSE wafer, with 1.2 trillion transistors and nearly 400,000 programmable computing cores. Even then, there was talk that the WSE megachip is actually a whole supercomputer on a chip with amazing performance. Cerebras soon created the CS-1 computer system, which uses the WSE chip. And it seems that a record-sized chip definitely deserves superlatives.
Cerebras Systems, logo.
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Cerebras recently announced that their CS-1 computer system measured forces in simulating power plant combustion processes with the Joule 2.0 supercomputer. This supercomputer works in the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). It is currently the 81st most powerful supercomputer in the world, with 271 TB of memory, can store 11.6 PB of data and its network transmits data at a rate of 83.2 TB per second.
Nevertheless, Joule 2.0 with the CS-1 computer system cannot be measured. He manages the mentioned simulations 200 times faster. As the head of the Cerebras team, Michael James and Dirk Van Essendelft from the US Department of Energy, modestly stated, contemporary supercomputers are not a worthy opponent for the CS-1 with the WSE megachip. Regardless of the number of processors and graphics processors available.
Computer system CS-1. Credit: Cerebras Systems.
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The Joule 2.0 supercomputer uses Intel Xeon chips of 20 computing cores, with a total of 16,000 of these cores. The WSE megachip has about 25 times more computing cores, plus 18 GB of RAM. The elements of the chip are connected by the Swarm communication system, which transmits data at a rate of 100 PB per second. Joule managed to simulate power plant combustion processes in 6 milliseconds and CS-1 declassified it in 28 microseconds.
Cerebras Systems chief Andrew Feldman has no doubt that for this type of calculation, their CS-1 is the fastest computer ever built. It is faster than any current combination of chips and processors. It is even so fast that it computes the simulation of power plant combustion processes faster than such a process takes place in real time. According to its creators, it is actually faster than physics. The key to the success of the CS-1 system seems to be the work of the WSE megachip with memory. Although the Joule supercomputer clearly has more memory, it cannot use it as efficiently as the CS-1.
Video: How Cerebras Built the World’s First Wafer-Scale Processor
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