March 13, 2024 – Cerebras Systems has doubled down on its existing world record of fastest AI chip with the introduction of the Wafer Scale Engine 3. The WSE-3 delivers twice the performance of the previous record-holder, the Cerebras WSE-2, at the same power draw and for the same price. Purpose built for training the industry’s largest AI models, the 5nm-based, 4 trillion transistor WSE-3 powers the Cerebras CS-3 AI supercomputer, delivering 125 petaflops of peak AI performance through 900,000 AI optimized compute cores.

Key Specifications:

• 4 trillion transistors
• 900,000 AI cores
• 125 petaflops of peak AI performance
• 44GB on-chip SRAM
• 5nm TSMC process
• External memory: 1.5TB, 12TB, or 1.2PB
• Trains AI models up to 24 trillion parameters
• Cluster size of up to 2048 CS-3 systems

With a huge memory system of up to 1.2 petabytes, the CS-3 is designed to train next generation frontier models 10x larger than GPT-4 and Gemini. Twenty four trillion parameter models can be stored in a single logical memory space without partitioning or refactoring, dramatically simplifying training workflow and accelerating developer productivity. Training a one-trillion parameter model on the CS-3 is as straightforward as training a one billion parameter model on GPUs.

The CS-3 is built for both enterprise and hyperscale needs. Compact four system configurations can fine tune 70B models in a day while at full scale using 2048 systems, Llama 70B can be trained from scratch in a single day – an unprecedented feat for generative AI.

The latest Cerebras Software Framework provides native support for PyTorch 2.0 and the latest AI models and techniques such as multi-modal models, vision transformers, mixture of experts, and diffusion. Cerebras remains the only platform that provides native hardware acceleration for dynamic and unstructured sparsity, speeding up training by up to 8x.

“When we started on this journey eight years ago, everyone said wafer-scale processors were a pipe dream. We could not be more proud to be introducing the third-generation of our groundbreaking water scale AI chip,” said Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras. “WSE-3 is the fastest AI chip in the world, purpose-built for the latest cutting-edge AI work, from mixture of experts to 24 trillion parameter models. We are thrilled for bring WSE-3 and CS-3 to market to help solve today’s biggest AI challenges.”

Superior Power Efficiency and Software Simplicity

With every component optimized for AI work, CS-3 delivers more compute performance at less space and less power than any other system. While GPUs power consumption is doubling generation to generation, the CS-3 doubles performance but stays within the same power envelope. the CS-3 offers superior ease of use, requiring 97% less code than GPUs for LLMs and the ability to train models ranging from 1B to 24T parameters in purely data parallel mode. A standard implementation of a GPT-3 sized model required just 565 lines of code on Cerebras – an industry record.

Industry Partnerships and Customer Momentum

Cerebras already has a size-able backlog of orders for CS-3 across enterprise, government and international clouds.

“As a long-time partner of Cerebras, we are interested to see what’s possible with the evolution of wafer-scale engineering. CS-3 and the supercomputers based on this architecture are powering novel scale systems that allow us to explore the limits of frontier AI and science,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne National Laboratory Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. “Cerebras’ audacity continues to pave the way for the future of AI.”

“As part of our multi-year strategic collaboration with Cerebras to develop AI models that improve patient outcomes and diagnoses, we are excited to see advancements being made on the technology capabilities to enhance our efforts,” said Dr. Matthew Callstrom, M.D., Mayo Clinic’s medical director for strategy and chair of radiology.

The CS-3 will also play an important role in the pioneering strategic partnership between Cerebras and G42. The Cerebras and G42 partnership has already delivered 8 exaFLOPs of AI supercomputer performance via Condor Galaxy 1 (CG-1) and Condor Galaxy 2 (CG-2). Both CG-1 and CG-2, deployed in California, are among the largest AI supercomputers in the world.

Today, Cerebras and G42 announced that Condor Galaxy 3 is under construction. Condor Galaxy 3 will be built with 64 CS-3 systems, producing 8 exaFLOPs of AI compute, one of the largest AI supercomputers in the world. Condor Galaxy 3 is the third installation in the Condor Galaxy network. The Cerebras G42 strategic partnership is set to deliver tens of exaFLOPs of AI compute. Condor Galaxy has trained some of the industry’s leading open–source models, including Jais–30B, Med42, Crystal-Coder–7B and BTLM-3B-8K.

“Our strategic partnership with Cerebras has been instrumental in propelling innovation at G42, and will contribute to the acceleration of the AI revolution on a global scale,” said Kiril Evtimov, Group CTO of G42.  “Condor Galaxy 3, our next AI supercomputer boasting 8 exaFLOPs, is currently under construction and will soon bring our system’s total production of AI compute to 16 exaFLOPs.“

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Source: Cerebras Systems