Europe's largest AI chip cluster drives innovation
The University, in partnership with Cerebras Systems, has started service on a powerful new computing system enabling ground-breaking new AI research and innovation.
The Cerebras Systems CS-3 cluster is now installed and in service at EPCC.
European First
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 Wafer Scale Engine processors – the largest AI computer chip ever built.
The new service builds on experience EPCC gained with earlier versions of the Cerebras system, and forms a key part of ongoing investment across the Edinburgh and the South-East Scotland city region in supporting AI innovation in research, business and public sector applications since 2018.
Professor of High-Performance Computing Mark Parsons has been Director of EPCC, the University's supercomputing centre, since 2016.
Driving Innovation
The CS-3 system can handle extremely large AI tasks at speed, with the technology enabling a more democratic approach to training AI models.
Scientists and machine learning practitioners from other disciplines beyond computer science can also work with the system to start building, training and using models with no need for complex parallel programming, with the new cluster able to achieve predictability of efforts that is unmatched by other technologies.
AI is transforming all of our lives, and this new system will help universities, public sector organisations and companies large and small to train and use AI models at speeds and with ease no other technologies can match. Using Cerebras’s record-breaking inference technology allows EPCC to continue working at the forefront of supercomputing and our investment in this system brings a uniquely powerful AI resource to our region.
Professor Mark Parsons
EPCC Director
New research
The University of Edinburgh has been a world-leader in AI for the past 60 years.
Cerebras’s previous systems at EPCC have already enabled researchers at the University to develop highly optimised inference software for Large Language Models (LLMs) to explore their potential to support biomedical AI, and for local company smartR AI™ to explore fine-tuning of LLMs.
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 increased compute capability, the new CS-3s will also enable EPCC to continue its AI research into parallelism and energy efficiency.
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.
Andrew Feldman
CEO and co-founder of Cerebras
World-leading partners
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.
It is one of the largest supercomputing centres in Europe, focusing on traditional supercomputing, data science and AI – operating services and undertaking collaborative R&D in all these areas and has run national supercomputing services for the UK since 1994.
EPCC has expanded its multi-year partnership with Cerebras Systems with the new CS-3 cluster. Cerebras is a team of pioneering computer architects, computer scientists, deep learning researchers, and engineers of all types, with a mission is to accelerate generative AI development by building a new class of AI supercomputer.
