Minisymposium Presentation

The Cerebras CS2 is a wafer scale processor with 850,000 simple cores connected with a 2D mesh network. The CS2 has enjoyed tremendous success in the AI space both in performance and ease of use, allowing users to interact with it through a familiar framework - Pytorch. However, it is also possible to program the wafer directly using the Cerebras SDK using CSL, a proprietary domain specific language. This can be a daunting task where researchers have to learn a new language and hardware details, as well as a different way of designing algorithms in a data-flow manner. The architecture of the CS2 is well suited to linear algebra, an integral part to many scientific computation algorithms, so it would be beneficial to have an easier point of entry. To this end, we have been creating an interface to the linear algebra library PETSc and associated Cerebras SDK back-end code with the aim of lowering the barrier to entry to using the CS2 for scientific applications. In this talk we will describe our efforts in this project as well as the experience and lessons learned from using and programming the Cerebras wafer scale processor.