Cerebras

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cerebras Systems
TypePrivate
IndustrySemiconductor industry Artificial Intelligence
Founded2015; 7 years ago (2015)
Headquarters
Sunnyvale, California
,
USA
Key people
Andrew Feldman (CEO)
Websitewww.cerebras.net

Cerebras Systems is an American artificial intelligence company with offices in Sunnyvale and San Diego, California, Toronto, and Tokyo.[1] Cerebras builds computer systems for complex artificial intelligence deep learning applications.[2]

History[]

Cerebras was founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman, Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie and Jean-Philippe Fricker.[3] These five founders worked together at SeaMicro, which was started in 2007 by Feldman and Lauterbach and was later sold to AMD in 2012 for $334 million.[4][5]

In May 2016, Cerebras secured $27 million in series A funding led by Benchmark, Foundation Capital and Eclipse Ventures.[6][3]

In December 2016, Series B funding was led by Coatue, followed in January 2017 with series C funding led by VY Capital.[3]

In November 2018, Cerebras closed its series D round with $88 million, making the company a unicorn. Investors in this round included Altimeter, VY Capital, Coatue, Foundation Capital, Benchmark, and Eclipse.[7][8]

On August 19, 2019, Cerebras announced its Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE).[9][10][11]

In November 2019, Cerebras closed its series E round with over $270 million for a valuation of $2.4 billion.[12]

In 2020, the company announced an office in Japan and partnership with Tokyo Electron Devices.[13]

In April 2021, Cerebras announced the CS-2 based on the company's Wafer Scale Engine Two (WSE-2), which has 850,000 cores.[1] In August 2021, the company announced its brain-scale technology that can run a neural network with over 120 trillion connections.[14]

In November 2021, Cerebras announced that it had raised an additional $250 million in Series F funding, valuing the company at over $4 billion. The Series F financing round was led by Alpha Wave Ventures and Abu Dhabi Growth Fund (ADG).[15] To date, the company has raised $720 million in financing.[15] [16]

Technology[]

The Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) is a single, wafer-scale integrated processor that includes compute, memory and interconnect fabric. The WSE-1 powers the Cerebras CS-1, which is Cerebras’ first-generation AI computer.[17] It is a 19-inch rack-mounted appliance designed for AI training and inference workloads in a datacenter.[10] The CS-1 includes a single WSE primary processor with 400,000 processing cores, as well as twelve 100 Gigabit Ethernet connections to move data in and out.[18][10] The WSE-1 has 1.2 trillion transistors, 400,000 compute cores and 18 gigabytes of memory.[9][10][11]

In April 2021, Cerebras announced the CS-2 AI system based on the 2nd-generation Wafer Scale Engine (WSE-2), manufactured by the 7 nm process of TSMC .[1] It is 26 inches tall and fits in one-third of a standard data center rack.[19][1] The Cerebras WSE-2 has 850,000 cores and 2.6 trillion transistors.[19][20] The WSE-2 expanded on-chip SRAM to 40 gigabytes, memory bandwidth to 20 petabytes per second and total fabric bandwidth to 220 petabits per second.[21][22]

In August 2021, the company announced a system which connects multiple integrated circuits (commonly called "chips") into a neural network with many connections. [14] It enables a single system to support AI models with more than 120 trillion parameters.[23]

Deployments[]

Customers are reportedly using Cerebras technologies in the pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors.[24]

In 2020, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) began using the Cerebras CS-1 AI system in their London AI hub, for neural network models to accelerate genetic and genomic research and reduce the time taken in drug discovery.[25] The GSK research team was able to increase the complexity of the encoder models they could generate, while reducing training time.[26] Other pharmaceutical industry customers include AstraZeneca, who was able to reduce training time from two weeks on a cluster of GPUs to two days using the Cerebras CS-1 system.[27]

Argonne National Laboratory has been using the CS-1 since 2020 in COVID-19 research and cancer tumor research based on the world’s largest cancer treatment database.[28] A series of models running on the CS-1 to predict cancer drug response to tumors achieved speed-ups of many hundreds of times on the CS-1 compared to their GPU baselines.[24]

The Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Lassen supercomputer incorporated the CS-1 in both classified and non-classified areas for physics simulations.[29]

In August 2021, Cerebras announced a partnership with Peptilogics on the development of AI for peptide therapeutics.[30]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d "Cerebras launches new AI supercomputing processor with 2.6 trillion transistors". VentureBeat. 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  2. ^ "Cerebras Systems deploys the 'world's fastest AI computer' at Argonne National Lab". VentureBeat. 2019-11-19. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  3. ^ a b c Tilley, Aaron. "AI Chip Boom: This Stealthy AI Hardware Startup Is Worth Almost A Billion". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  4. ^ Hardy, Quentin (2012-02-29). "A.M.D. Buying SeaMicro for $334 Million". Bits Blog. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  5. ^ "How Google Spawned The 384-Chip Server". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  6. ^ "A stealthy startup called Cerebras raised around $25 million to build deep learning hardware". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  7. ^ Martin, Dylan (2019-11-27). "AI Chip Startup Cerebras Reveals 'World's Fastest AI Supercomputer'". CRN. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  8. ^ Strategy, Moor Insights and. "Cerebras Unveils AI Supercomputer-On-A-Chip". Forbes. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  9. ^ a b Metz, Cade (2019-08-19). "To Power A.I., Start-Up Creates a Giant Computer Chip". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  10. ^ a b c d "The Cerebras CS-1 computes deep learning AI problems by being bigger, bigger, and bigger than any other chip". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  11. ^ a b "Full Page Reload". IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  12. ^ "Cerebras Crams More Compute Into Second-Gen 'Dinner Plate Sized' Chip". EE Times. Retrieved 2021-05-12.
  13. ^ Cerebras Systems. "Cerebras Systems Expands Global Footprint with New Offices in Tokyo, Japan, and Toronto, Canada". Press Release. Retrieved August 13, 2021.
  14. ^ a b "Cerebras' Tech Trains "Brain-Scale" AIs". IEEE Spectrum. 2021-08-24. Retrieved 2021-09-22.
  15. ^ a b "Cerebras Systems Raises $250M in Funding for Over $4B Valuation to Advance the Future of AI Compute". HPCwire. Retrieved 2021-11-10.
  16. ^ "AI chip startup Cerebras Systems raises $250 million in funding". Reuters. 2021-11-10. Retrieved 2021-11-10.
  17. ^ "Full Page Reload". IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  18. ^ "Neocortex Will Be First-of-Its-Kind 800,000-Core AI Supercomputer". HPCwire. 2020-06-09. Retrieved 2021-04-30.
  19. ^ a b Ray, Tiernan (April 20, 2021). "Cerebras continues 'absolute domination' of high-end compute, it says, with world's hugest chip two-dot-oh". ZDNet. Retrieved August 13, 2021.
  20. ^ Knight, Will (August 24, 2021). "A New Chip Cluster Will Make Massive AI Models Possible". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2021-08-25.
  21. ^ "Cerebras Systems Smashes the 2.5 Trillion Transistor Mark with New Second Generation Wafer Scale Engine". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2021-06-02.
  22. ^ Cutress, Dr Ian. "Cerebras Unveils Wafer Scale Engine Two (WSE2): 2.6 Trillion Transistors, 100% Yield". www.anandtech.com. Retrieved 2021-06-03.
  23. ^ August 2021, Joel Khalili 25 (2021-08-25). "The world's largest chip is creating AI networks larger than the human brain". TechRadar. Retrieved 2021-09-22.
  24. ^ a b "LLNL, ANL and GSK Provide Early Glimpse into Cerebras AI System Performance". HPCwire. 2020-10-13. Retrieved 2021-06-03.
  25. ^ Ray, Tiernan (September 5, 2020). "Glaxo's biology research with novel Cerebras machine shows hardware may change how AI is done". ZDNet. Retrieved August 13, 2021.
  26. ^ "Cerebras debuts new 2.6 trillion transistor wafer scale chip for AI". www.datacenterdynamics.com. Retrieved 2021-06-17.
  27. ^ Hansen, Lars Lynne (2021-04-26). "Accelerating Drug Discovery Research with New AI Models: a look at the AstraZeneca Cerebras…". Medium. Retrieved 2021-06-03.
  28. ^ Shah, Agam (2020-05-06). "National Lab Taps AI Machine With Massive Chip to Fight Coronavirus". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2021-06-03.
  29. ^ "Cerebras puts 'world's largest computer chip' in Lassen supercomputer". VentureBeat. 2020-08-19. Retrieved 2021-06-03.
  30. ^ "Peptilogics and Cerebras Systems Partner on AI Solutions to Advance Peptide Therapeutics". HPCwire. Retrieved 2021-09-22.

External links[]

Retrieved from ""