A Big Chip for Big Science: Watching the COVID-19 Virus in Action - Cerebras

This post details the application of Cerebras CS-2 hardware for accelerating the training of a Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) used for steering scientific simulations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The CVAE, which was a bottleneck due to its quadratic time and space complexity, achieved significantly higher training throughput on a single CS-2 system (24,000 samples/s) compared to 1,536 GPUs on the Summit supercomputer. The post highlights the 'out-of-the-box' performance and ease of use of the CS-2 system for organizations lacking large GPU clusters, enabling researchers to study microseconds of molecular motion instead of tens of nanoseconds.