Cerebras Systems, a pioneer in accelerating generative AI, and G42, a UAE-based technology holding group, have announced the creation of Condor Galaxy, a network of nine interconnected supercomputers designed to significantly reduce AI model training time. The first AI supercomputer on this network, Condor Galaxy 1 (CG-1), boasts 4 exaFLOPs and 54 million cores.
Cerebras Systems is an American company that develops and provides computer systems and chips for artificial intelligence applications. Founded in 2016, Cerebras Systems is backed by leading venture capitalists and technologists. Its flagship product so fare is the Wafer Scale Engine, the largest and fastest AI chip in the world.
A New Approach to AI Computing
The Condor Galaxy network is a new approach to AI computing. The first supercomputer in this network, CG-1, is located in Santa Clara, California, and links 64 Cerebras CS-2 systems together into a single, easy-to-use AI supercomputer. The supercomputer has an AI training capacity of 4 exaFLOPs and is offered as a cloud service by Cerebras and G42. This allows customers to enjoy the performance of an AI supercomputer without having to manage or distribute models over physical systems.
The partnership between Cerebras and G42 is designed to enable G42 and its cloud customers to train large, innovative models quickly and easily, thereby accelerating innovation. The strategic partnership has already advanced state-of-the-art AI models in Arabic bilingual chat, healthcare, and climate studies.
Cerebras and G42 plan to deploy two more supercomputers, CG-2 and CG-3, in the U.S. in early 2024. These supercomputers will be interconnected in a 12 exaFLOPs, 162 million core distributed AI supercomputer consisting of 192 Cerebras CS-2s and fed by more than 218,000 high-performance AMD EPYC CPU cores. The companies plan to bring online six additional Condor Galaxy supercomputers in 2024, bringing the total compute power to 36 exaFLOPs
AI Supercomputers on the Rise
AI supercomputers are the backbone of AI research and development, enabling the creation of sophisticated models and algorithms. Here are some of the current systems that are being developed and/or used currently.
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Summit: Developed by IBM and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Summit is one of the most prominent AI supercomputers. It has a peak performance of 200 petaflops and can handle 3.3 exabytes of data. Summit is used for various scientific and medical research projects, such as simulating climate change, discovering new drugs, and analyzing genomic data.
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Sunway TaihuLight: Built by China's National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology, Sunway TaihuLight has a peak performance of 125 petaflops and can process 10.65 petabytes of data. It is mainly used for industrial and engineering applications, such as weather forecasting, oil exploration, and aerospace design.
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Selene: Developed by NVIDIA and hosted by the New Mexico Consortium, Selene has a peak performance of 63 petaflops and can store 1.6 petabytes of data. Selene is designed to support NVIDIA's research and development in AI, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and recommender systems.
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Andromeda: Built by Cerebras, Andromeda is a unique AI supercomputer with 13.5 million cores capable of speeds over an exaflop. It is designed specifically for AI and has demonstrated near-perfect linear scaling of AI workloads for large language models.
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IBM Vela: IBM's first AI-optimized, cloud-native supercomputer, Vela, is designed exclusively for large-scale AI. It is housed within IBM Cloud and is currently used by the IBM Research community. Vela's design offers flexibility to scale up at will and readily deploy similar infrastructure into any IBM Cloud data center across the globe.
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DGX SuperPOD: NVIDIA's DGX SuperPOD is a powerful AI supercomputer designed for enterprise-scale AI infrastructure. It is powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and delivers 700 petaflops of AI performance.
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Meta's AI Research SuperCluster (RSC): Meta's RSC is a supercomputer designed to accelerate AI research. It is one of the fastest AI supercomputers in the world and is used to train large AI models, including natural language processing and computer vision models.
