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System Specifications

Neocortex features two Cerebras CS-2 systems and an HPE Superdome Flex HPC server robustly provisioned to drive the CS-2 systems simultaneously at maximum speed and support the complementary requirements of AI and HPDA workflows. Neocortex is federated with Bridges-2 to yield great benefits including:

  • Access to the Bridges-2 filesystem for management of persistent data
  • General-purpose computing for complementary data wrangling and preprocessing
    • High-bandwidth connectivity to other XSEDE sites, campus, labs, and clouds
  • The configuration of each specialized system is described below:
    • Each CS-2 features a Cerebras WSE2 (Wafer Scale Engine2), the largest chip ever built.
      AI Processor Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE2)
      • 850,000 Sparse Linear Algebra Compute (SLAC) Cores
      • 2.6 trillion transistors
      • 46,225 mm2 40 GB SRAM on-chip memory
      • 20 PB/s memory bandwidth
      • 220 Pb/s interconnect bandwidth
      System I/O 1.2 Tb/s (12 × 100 GbE ports)
    • HPE Superdome Flex
      Processors 32 x Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L, 28 cores, 56 threads each, 2.70-4.0 GHz, 38.5 MB cache (more info).
      Memory 24 TiB RAM, aggregate memory bandwidth of 4.5 TB/s
      Local Disk 32 x 6.4 TB NVMe SSDs
      • 204.6 TB aggregate
      • 150 GB/s read bandwidth
      Network to CS-2 systems 24 x 100 GbE interfaces
      • 1.2 Tb/s (150 GB/s) to each Cerebras CS-2 system
      • 2.4 Tb/s aggregate
      Interconnect to Bridges-2 16 Mellanox HDR-100 InfiniBand adapters
      • 1.6 Tb/s aggregate
      OS Red Hat Enterprise Linux