Waferscale Makes Further AI Supercomputing Inroads

The battle for HPC centers and national labs is underway among the leading AI chip startups in the high-end datacenter space (Graphcore, Cerebras, and SambaNova in particular). We talked last week about how Graphcore is stacking up in traditional supercomputing spaces at the University of Bristol, SambaNova has found inroads at Argonne and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) labs in the U.S., and Cerebras has also become established at LLNL. In addition to those recent wins, Cerebras has crossed the Atlantic for its first European win at EPCC in Edinburgh. Despite this tit-for-tat in HPC site wins among the AI chip triumvirate, the jury is still out on what the favored architecture will be to meet the needs of deep learning in supercomputing. There are enough systems distributed around the globe now, however, that within a year we might start to have a sense, especially since EPCC will be evaluating the Cerebras experiments to its neighbors with Graphcore.