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#439168 The World’s Biggest AI Chip Now Comes ...
The world’s biggest AI chip just doubled its specs—without adding an inch.
The Cerebras Systems Wafer Scale Engine is about the size of a big dinner plate. All that surface area enables a lot more of everything, from processors to memory. The first WSE chip, released in 2019, had an incredible 1.2 trillion transistors and 400,000 processing cores. Its successor doubles everything, except its physical size.
The WSE-2 crams in 2.6 trillion transistors and 850,000 cores on the same dinner plate. Its on-chip memory has increased from 18 gigabytes to 40 gigabytes, and the rate it shuttles information to and from said memory has gone from 9 petabytes per second to 20 petabytes per second.
It’s a beast any way you slice it.
The WSE-2 is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and it was a jump from TSMC’s 16-nanometer chipmaking process to its 7-nanometer process—skipping the 10-nanometer node—that enabled most of the WSE-2’s gains.
This required changes to the physical design of the chip, but Cerebras says they also made improvements to each core above and beyond what was needed to make the new process work. The updated mega-chip should be a lot faster and more efficient.
Why Make Giant Computer Chips?
While graphics processing units (GPUs) still reign supreme in artificial intelligence, they weren’t made for AI in particular. Rather, GPUs were first developed and used for graphics-heavy applications like gaming.
They’ve done amazing things for AI and supercomputing, but in the last several years, specialized chips made for AI are on the up and up.
Cerebras is one of the contenders, alongside other up-and-comers like Graphcore and SambaNova and more familiar names like Intel and NVIDIA.
The company likes to compare the WSE-2 to a top AI processor (NVIDIA’s A100) to underscore just how different it is from the competition. The A100 has two percent the number of transistors (54.2 billion) occupying a little under two percent the surface area. It’s much smaller, but the A100’s might is more fully realized when hundreds or thousands of chips are linked together in a larger system.
In contrast, the WSE-2 reduces the cost and complexity of linking all those chips together by jamming as much processing and memory as possible onto a single wafer of silicon. At the same time, removing the need to move data between lots of chips spread out on multiple server racks dramatically increases speed and efficiency.
The chip’s design gives its small, speedy cores their own dedicated memory and facilitates quick communication between cores. And Cerebras’s compiling software works with machine learning models using standard frameworks—like PyTorch and TensorFlow—to make distributing tasks among the chip’s cores fairly painless.
The approach is called wafer-scale computing because the chip is the size of a standard silicon wafer from which many chips are normally cut. Wafer-scale computing has been on the radar for years, but Cerebras is the first to make a commercially viable chip.
The chip comes packaged in a computer system called the CS-2. The system includes cooling and power supply and fits in about a third of a standard server rack.
After the startup announced the chip in 2019, it began working with a growing list of customers. Cerebras counts GlaxoSmithKline, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Argonne National (among others) as customers alongside unnamed partners in pharmaceuticals, biotech, manufacturing, and the military. Many applications have been in AI, but not all. Last year, the company said the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) used the chip to outpace a supercomputer in a simulation of fluid dynamics.
Will Wafer-Scale Go Big?
Whether wafer-scale computing catches on remains to be seen.
Cerebras says their chip significantly speeds up machine learning tasks, and testimony from early customers—some of which claim pretty big gains—supports this. But there aren’t yet independent head-to-head comparisons. Neither Cerebras nor most other AI hardware startups, for example, took part in a recent MLperf benchmark test of AI systems. (The top systems nearly all used NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate their algorithms.)
According to IEEE Spectrum, Cerebras says they’d rather let interested buyers test the system on their own specific neural networks as opposed to selling them on a more general and potentially less applicable benchmark. This isn’t an uncommon approach AI analyst Karl Freund said, “Everybody runs their own models that they developed for their own business. That’s the only thing that matters to buyers.”
It’s also worth noting the WSE can only handle tasks small enough to fit on its chip. The company says most suitable problems it’s encountered can fit, and the WSE-2 delivers even more space. Still, the size of machine learning algorithms is growing rapidly. Which is perhaps why Cerebras is keen to note that two or even three CS-2’s can fit into a server cabinet.
Ultimately, the WSE-2 doesn’t make sense for smaller tasks in which one or a few GPUs will do the trick. At the moment the chip is being used in large, compute-heavy projects in science and research. Current applications include cancer research and drug discovery, gravity wave detection, and fusion simulation. Cerebras CEO and cofounder Andrew Feldman says it may also be made available to customers with shorter-term, less intensive needs on the cloud.
The market for the chip is niche, but Feldman told HPC Wire it’s bigger than he anticipated in 2015, and it’s still growing as new approaches to AI are continually popping up. “The market is moving unbelievably quickly,” he said.
The increasing competition between AI chips is worth watching. There may end up being several fit-to-purpose approaches or one that rises to the top.
For the moment, at least, it appears there’s some appetite for a generous helping of giant computer chips.
Image Credit: Cerebras Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439164 Advancing AI With a Supercomputer: A ...
Building a computer that can support artificial intelligence at the scale and complexity of the human brain will be a colossal engineering effort. Now researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have outlined how they think we’ll get there.
How, when, and whether we’ll ever create machines that can match our cognitive capabilities is a topic of heated debate among both computer scientists and philosophers. One of the most contentious questions is the extent to which the solution needs to mirror our best example of intelligence so far: the human brain.
Rapid advances in AI powered by deep neural networks—which despite their name operate very differently than the brain—have convinced many that we may be able to achieve “artificial general intelligence” without mimicking the brain’s hardware or software.
Others think we’re still missing fundamental aspects of how intelligence works, and that the best way to fill the gaps is to borrow from nature. For many that means building “neuromorphic” hardware that more closely mimics the architecture and operation of biological brains.
The problem is that the existing computer technology we have at our disposal looks very different from biological information processing systems, and operates on completely different principles. For a start, modern computers are digital and neurons are analog. And although both rely on electrical signals, they come in very different flavors, and the brain also uses a host of chemical signals to carry out processing.
Now though, researchers at NIST think they’ve found a way to combine existing technologies in a way that could mimic the core attributes of the brain. Using their approach, they outline a blueprint for a “neuromorphic supercomputer” that could not only match, but surpass the physical limits of biological systems.
The key to their approach, outlined in Applied Physics Letters, is a combination of electronics and optical technologies. The logic is that electronics are great at computing, while optical systems can transmit information at the speed of light, so combining them is probably the best way to mimic the brain’s excellent computing and communication capabilities.
It’s not a new idea, but so far getting our best electronic and optical hardware to gel has proven incredibly tough. The team thinks they’ve found a potential workaround, dropping the temperature of the system to negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit.
While that might seem to only complicate matters, it actually opens up a host of new hardware possibilities. There are a bunch of high-performance electronic and optical components that only work at these frigid temperatures, like superconducting electronics, single-photon detectors, and silicon LEDs.
The researchers propose using these components to build artificial neurons that operate more like their biological cousins than conventional computer components, firing off electrical impulses, or spikes, rather than shuttling numbers around.
Each neuron has thousands of artificial synapses made from single photon detectors, which pick up optical messages from other neurons. These incoming signals are combined and processed by superconducting circuits, and once they cross a certain threshold a silicon LED is activated, sending an optical impulse to all downstream neurons.
The researchers envisage combining millions of these neurons on 300-millimeter silicon wafers and then stacking the wafers to create a highly interconnected network that mimics the architecture of the brain, with short-range connections dealt with by optical waveguides on each chip and long-range ones dealt with by fiber optic cables.
They acknowledge that the need to cryogenically cool the entire device is a challenge. But they say the improved power efficiency and that of their design should cancel out the cost of this cooling, and a system on the scale of the human brain should require no more power or space than a modern supercomputer. They also point out that there is significant R&D going into cryogenically-cooled quantum computers, which they could likely piggyback off of.
Some of the basic components of the system have already been experimentally demonstrated by the researchers, though they admit there’s still a long way to go to put all the pieces together. While many of these components are compatible with standard electronics fabrication, finding ways to manufacture them cheaply and integrate them will be a mammoth task.
Perhaps more important is the question of what kind of software the machine would run. It’s designed to implement “spiking neural networks” similar to those found in the brain, but our understanding of biological neural networks is still rudimentary, and our ability to mimic them is even worse. While both scientists and tech companies have been experimenting with the approach, it is still far less capable than deep learning.
Given the enormous engineering challenge involved in building a device of this scale, it may be a while before this blueprint makes it off the drawing board. But the proposal is an intriguing new chapter in the hunt for artificial general intelligence.
Image Credit: InspiredImages from Pixabay Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439151 Biohybrid soft robot with ...
A team of researchers working at Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology has developed a skeletal-muscle-based, biohybrid soft robot that can swim faster than other skeletal-muscle-based biobots. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes building and testing their soft robot. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439127 Cobots Act Like Puppies to Better ...
Human-robot interaction goes both ways. You’ve got robots understanding (or attempting to understand) humans, as well as humans understanding (or attempting to understand) robots. Humans, in my experience, are virtually impossible to understand even under the best of circumstances. But going the other way, robots have all kinds of communication tools at their disposal. Lights, sounds, screens, haptics—there are lots of options. That doesn’t mean that robot to human (RtH) communication is easy, though, because the ideal communication modality is something that is low cost and low complexity while also being understandable to almost anyone.
One good option for something like a collaborative robot arm can be to use human-inspired gestures (since it doesn’t require any additional hardware), although it’s important to be careful when you start having robots doing human stuff, because it can set unreasonable expectations if people think of the robot in human terms. In order to get around this, roboticists from Aachen University are experimenting with animal-like gestures for cobots instead, modeled after the behavior of puppies. Puppies!
For robots that are low-cost and appearance-constrained, animal-inspired (zoomorphic) gestures can be highly effective at state communication. We know this because of tails on Roombas:
While this is an adorable experiment, adding tails to industrial cobots is probably not going to happen. That’s too bad, because humans have an intuitive understanding of dog gestures, and this extends even to people who aren’t dog owners. But tails aren’t necessary for something to display dog gestures; it turns out that you can do it with a standard robot arm:
In a recent preprint in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), first author Vanessa Sauer used puppies to inspire a series of communicative gestures for a Franka Emika Panda arm. Specifically, the arm was to be used in a collaborative assembly task, and needed to communicate five states to the human user, including greeting the user, prompting the user to take a part, waiting for a new command, an error condition when a container was empty of parts, and then shutting down. From the paper:
For each use case, we mirrored the intention of the robot (e.g., prompting the user to take a part) to an intention, a dog may have (e.g., encouraging the owner to play). In a second step, we collected gestures that dogs use to express the respective intention by leveraging real-life interaction with dogs, online videos, and literature. We then translated the dog gestures into three distinct zoomorphic gestures by jointly applying the following guidelines inspired by:
Mimicry. We mimic specific dog behavior and body language to communicate robot states.
Exploiting structural similarities. Although the cobot is functionally designed, we exploit certain components to make the gestures more “dog-like,” e.g., the camera corresponds to the dog’s eyes, or the end-effector corresponds to the dog’s snout.
Natural flow. We use kinesthetic teaching and record a full trajectory to allow natural and flowing movements with increased animacy.
A user study comparing the zoomorphic gestures to a more conventional light display for state communication during the assembly task showed that the zoomorphic gestures were easily recognized by participants as dog-like, even if the participants weren’t dog people. And the zoomorphic gestures were also more intuitively understood than the light displays, although the classification of each gesture wasn’t perfect. People also preferred the zoomorphic gestures over more abstract gestures designed to communicate the same concept. Or as the paper puts it, “Zoomorphic gestures are significantly more attractive and intuitive and provide more joy when using.” An online version of the study is here, so give it a try and provide yourself with some joy.
While zoomorphic gestures (at least in this very preliminary research) aren’t nearly as accurate at state communication as using something like a screen, they’re appealing because they’re compelling, easy to understand, inexpensive to implement, and less restrictive than sounds or screens. And there’s no reason why you can’t use both!
For a few more details, we spoke with the first author on this paper, Vanessa Sauer.
IEEE Spectrum: Where did you get the idea for this research from, and why do you think it hasn't been more widely studied or applied in the context of practical cobots?
Vanessa Sauer: I'm a total dog person. During a conversation about dogs and how their ways of communicating with their owner has evolved over time (e.g., more expressive face, easy to understand even without owning a dog), I got the rough idea for my research. I was curious to see if this intuitive understanding many people have of dog behavior could also be applied to cobots that communicate in a similar way. Especially in social robotics, approaches utilizing zoomorphic gestures have been explored. I guess due to the playful nature, less research and applications have been done in the context of industry robots, as they often have a stronger focus on efficiency.
How complex of a concept can be communicated in this way?
In our “proof-of-concept” style approach, we used rather basic robot states to be communicated. The challenge with more complex robot states would be to find intuitive parallels in dog behavior. Nonetheless, I believe that more complex states can also be communicated with dog-inspired gestures.
How would you like to see your research be put into practice?
I would enjoy seeing zoomorphic gestures offered as modality-option on cobots, especially cobots used in industry. I think that could have the potential to reduce inhibitions towards collaborating with robots and make the interaction more fun.
Photos, Robots: Franka Emika; Dogs: iStockphoto
Zoomorphic Gestures for Communicating Cobot States, by Vanessa Sauer, Axel Sauer, and Alexander Mertens from Aachen University and TUM, will be published in
RA-L. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots
#439125 Baubot comes out with two new robots to ...
Despite artificial intelligence and robotics adapting to many other areas of life and the work force, construction has long remained dominated by humans in neon caps and vests. Now, the robotics company Baubot has developed a Printstones robot, which they hope to supplement human construction workers onsite. Continue reading
Posted in Human Robots