Supercomputer On A Single Chip

avatar

The Mega-chip WSE includes 1.2 trillion transistors and almost 400.000 cores. Its unique architecture makes it a supercomputer on a chip.

wafer4082938_1920.jpg

Image by Samuel Faber from Pixabay

It's roughly a year since the start-up company Cerebras Systems from California amazed the world with their unique chip or more precisely a whole silicon wafer WSE with 1.2 trillion transistors and almost 400.000 programmable computing cores. Even back then people said the WSE mega-chip is essentially a whole supercomputer on a chip and it boasts amazing power. Cerebras Systems soon created their computer system CS-1 that uses the WSE chip. And as it seems the record-breaking chip deserves its praise.

Recently, Cerebras Systems published that their computer system CS-1 went against the supercomputer Joule 2.0 in simulating power-plant combustion processes. Joule 2.0 is a supercomputer that can be found in the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). Currently, it is the 81st most powerful supercomputer in the world with 271 TB of memory, the capability to store up to 11.6 PB of data, and a network speed of 83.2 TB per second.

Yet, Joule 2.0 got wrecked by CS-1. CS-1 went through the simulations two-hundred times faster. That makes it more than a worthy competitor to current supercomputers no matter the number of cores they boast.

To give you a better idea of just how powerful CS-1 is – The Joule 2.0 uses Intel Xeon chips with each having 20 cores totaling 16.000 throughout the whole supercomputer. The mega-chip WSE has roughly 25 times more cores plus 18 GB of RAM. The individual parts of the chip are connected by a communication system called Swarm capable of transferring data at a blistering speed of 100 PB per second.

Sources:


  • If you like the content I’m producing about science maybe you will like the content I produce about gaming as well! Be sure to check out my other posts!


0
0
0.000
0 comments