Sandia Awards Major Contract to Cerebras Systems - Cerebras

This post announces a multi-year collaboration between Cerebras Systems and Sandia National Laboratories (along with LLNL and LANL) to accelerate advanced simulation and computing applications for the nation's stockpile stewardship mission. The partnership aims to achieve a 40X performance improvement over exascale computing platforms like El Capitan by leveraging Cerebras's Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE-2). The post highlights the WSE-2's specifications (2.6 trillion transistors, 850,000 AI-optimized cores, 40GB on-chip memory) and its advantages in handling sparse models and on-chip data flows. It also references previous successful partnerships and results in Molecular Dynamics (Stream-AI-MD, achieving ~50X improvement for protein folding), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD, outperforming supercomputers by 200X for PDE codes), and Seismic Modeling (outperforming modern GPUs by 200X). The Cerebras SDK and Cerebras Software Language (CSL) are mentioned as tools enabling these advancements.