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arXiv:2010.03660cs.DC

Fast Stencil-Code Computation on a Wafer-Scale Processor

Kamil Rocki, Dirk Van Essendelft, Ilya Sharapov, Robert Schreiber, Michael Morrison, Vladimir Kibardin, Andrey Portnoy, Jean Francois Dietiker, Madhava Syamlal, Michael James

Abstract

The performance of CPU-based and GPU-based systems is often low for PDE codes, where large, sparse, and often structured systems of linear equations must be solved. Iterative solvers are limited by data movement, both between caches and memory and between nodes. Here we describe the solution of such systems of equations on the Cerebras Systems CS-1, a wafer-scale processor that has the memory bandwidth and communication latency to perform well. We achieve 0.86 PFLOPS on a single wafer-scale system for the solution by BiCGStab of a linear system arising from a 7-point finite difference stencil on a 600 X 595 X 1536 mesh, achieving about one third of the machine's peak performance. We explain the system, its architecture and programming, and its performance on this problem and related problems. We discuss issues of memory capacity and floating point precision. We outline plans to extend this work towards full applications.

arXiv comments
SC 20: The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, to appear
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.DCDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

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Linked by 2 identifiable commenters in 2 comments across 2 threads, from Nov 2020 to Jun 2021. Found in 1 HN submission from Oct 2020 to Oct 2020. Open submission discussions.

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Discussed in comments2 threads

  1. The Cerebras CS-2 wafer-scale engine (850k cores, 40 GB SRAM) 1 comment

    • There's better info here: https://blog.inten.to/hardware-for-deep-learning-part-4-asic... "The instruction set supports operations on INT16, FP16, and FP32 types. Floating-point adds, multiplies, and fused multiply-accumulate (or FMAC, with no rounding of the product prior to…

      tyingqView on HNParent context

  2. Wafer Scale Compute: Setting Records in Computational Fluid Dynamics 1 comment

    • The corresponding paper is very interesting: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.03660.pdf Particularly the SpMV CS-1 code listing on page 5, and this comment (in section VI.B) about accuracy: > The measured normwise relative residuals with mixed and 32-bit are shown in Figure 9. Up to…

      rrssView on HNParent context

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