HPE and Cerebras build new AI supercomputer at LRZ in Munich

HPE and Cerebras Systems have built a new AI supercomputer in Munich, Germany, pairing a HPE Superdome Flex with the AI accelerator technology from Cerebras for use by the scientific and engineering community. The new system, created for the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ) in Munich, is being deployed to meet the current and expected future compute needs of researchers, including larger deep learning neural network models and the emergence of multi-modal problems that involve multiple data types such as images and speech, according to Laura Schulz, LRZ's head of Strategic Developments and Partnerships. "We're seeing an increase in large data volumes coming at us that need more and more processing, and models that are taking months to train, we want to be able to speed that up," Schulz said. "And then we're also seeing multi-modal problems, such as integration of natural language processing (NLP) and medical imaging or documents, so we have this complexity, we have this the need for faster, we have this need for bigger that's coming from our user side, from our facility side, and we need to make sure that we're constantly evaluating to have these different novel architectures, to have different usage models to be able to understand all that." The LRZ team decided that the Cerebras technology, with its large shared memory and scalability, was a good match for the "pain points" they were trying to resolve, she said.