University of Edinburgh installs Largest CS-3 Cluster in Europe to Accelerate AI Research and UK’s AI Capabilities
Operated by EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University and part of the Edinburgh International Data Facility, the cluster consists of four CS-3s using Cerebras’s latest 3rd generation of Wafer Scale Engine processors – the world’s largest AI chip ever built.
The new service, which builds on experience EPCC gained with the Cerebras CS-1 and CS-2 systems, is a key part of the AI service provided to the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region, as part of the Data Driven Innovation programme, which has been led by the University since 2018.
“AI is transforming all of our lives, and this investment will help universities, public sector organisations, and companies – large and small – to train and use AI models at speeds and with ease no other AI technologies can match,” said Professor Mark Parsons, EPCC Director.
“When we started our collaboration with Cerebras in 2020, the company’s technology focused on training AI models at scale. With the Cerebras CS-3 systems, we can now take advantage of Cerebras AI Inference – the company’s record-breaking inference technology. EPCC has always worked at the leading edge of supercomputing and our investment in this system brings a uniquely powerful AI resource to our region.”
Cerebras’s new CS-3 cluster installed at EPCC is capable to train models up to 240 billion parameters and can be easily extended to 1 trillion. It can fine-tune 70 billion parameter model in a day. The ease of use of Cerebras’s technology allows for more democratic approach to AI models – scientists and ML practitioners from other disciplines, not only computer science, can start building, training and using models with no need for complex parallel programming. The ability of Cerebras’s technology to scale linearly allows for predictability of the efforts that is unmatched by other technologies.
"We are honored to expand our multi-year partnership with EPCC with this new CS-3 cluster, which will be a major leap forward in advancing AI research and capabilities in the UK,” said Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras. “EPCC has done pioneering work in enabling the next generation of AI breakthroughs. With our largest installation in the European continent to date, we’re excited to be part of such an important initiative that will enable researchers and institutions to drive innovation and shape the future of AI and HPC at a scale previously thought impossible."
The University of Edinburgh has been a world-leader in AI for the past 60 years. The CS-2 systems at EPCC have already enabled researchers at the University to develop highly optimised wafer-scale inference software for Large Language Models (LLMs), to explore their use for biomedical AI, and for local company, smartR AI™ to explore fine-tuning of LLMs on the system. The EPCC systems have also helped researchers in India to develop an LLM for materials science and, in Switzerland, to adapt LLMs to better support Swiss German dialects. With 3.6 million AI compute cores, the CS-3s will also enable EPCC to continue its AI research into parallelism and energy efficiency.
EPCC is the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh. Since 1990 it has pioneered the use of novel and high-performance computing technologies for the benefit of academia, industry and commerce. With 150 staff and 120 postgraduate students, it is one of the largest supercomputing centres in Europe. It focuses on traditional supercomputing, data science and AI – operating services and undertaking collaborative R&D in all these areas. It has run national supercomputing services for the UK since 1994. Since 2018, it has been at the heart the Data Driven Innovation programme of the Edinburgh & SE Scotland City Region Deal, funded jointly by the UK and Scottish Governments. This highly successful economic growth programme has already met many of its lifetime targets at half-way point.
Cerebras Systems is a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, deep learning researchers, and engineers of all types. We have come together to accelerate generative AI by building from the ground up a new class of AI supercomputer. Our flagship product, the CS-3 system, is powered by the world’s largest and fastest commercially available AI processor, our Wafer-Scale Engine-3. CS-3s are quickly and easily clustered together to make the largest AI supercomputers in the world, and make placing models on the supercomputers dead simple by avoiding the complexity of distributed computing. Cerebras Inference delivers breakthrough inference speeds, empowering customers to create cutting-edge AI applications. Leading corporations, research institutions, and governments use Cerebras solutions for the development of pathbreaking proprietary models, and to train open-source models with millions of downloads. Cerebras solutions are available through the Cerebras Cloud and on premise.
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