Neocortex

PSC Resources Neocortex

Cerebras CS-2, the world’s most powerful AI system, is the main compute element of Neocortex.

Unlocking Interactive AI Development for Rapidly Evolving Research

Neocortex is a highly innovative resource that targets the acceleration of AI-powered scientific discovery by greatly shortening the time required for deep learning training and by fostering greater integration of artificial deep learning with scientific workflows.  The revolutionary hardware in Neocortex facilitates the development of more efficient algorithms for artificial intelligence and graph analytics.

Neocortex democratizes access to game-changing compute power, otherwise only available to tech giants, for students, postdocs, faculty, and others who require faster turnaround on training to analyze data and integrate AI with simulation. It also inspires the research community to scale their AI-based research and integrate AI advances into their research workflows.

With Neocortex, users can apply more accurate models and larger training data, scale model parallelism to unprecedented levels, and avoid the need for expensive and time-consuming hyperparameter optimization. This innovative AI platform enables the development of new algorithms in machine learning and graph analytics.

For more information about Neocortex, please email neocortex@psc.edu.

Research projects

Research on Neocortex spans topics from NLP through physics, chemistry and biology. See some of the exciting projects using Neocortex to advance knowledge.

Getting an allocation

See how to apply, including eligibility requirements and the Neocortex Acceptable Use Policy.

User guide

Learn about the applications that are supported and how to conduct your research on Neocortex.

PSC’s Neocortex Among Elite Artificial Intelligence Computers Selected for National AI Research Resource Pilot Project

Initial Goal of NAIRR Pilot Project, Also Supported by Allocations Software Developed by PSC and ACCESS Partners, Will Be to Explore Trustworthy AI

PSC Recognized for Advances in Clean Energy Technology, Application of New Technology to Industrial Problem

14th Year Center Has Received HPCwire Awards, Presented Annually to Leaders in the Global High Performance Computing Community

Neocortex Speeds Fluid Simulation by Several Hundred Times

Real-time simulations offer better, faster predictions in dozens of real-world problems

Events

Contact us

Email us at neocortex@psc.edu

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 projects can also use Bridges-2, PSC’s flagship computing resource.

Cerebras CS-2

Each CS-2 features a Cerebras WSE-2 (Wafer Scale Engine 2), the largest chip ever built.

AI processor: Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 2

  • 850,000 Sparse Linear Algebra Compute (SLAC) Cores
  • 2.6 trillion transistors
  • 46,225 mm² 40 GB SRAM on-chip memory
  • 20 PB/s aggregate 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 4.5TB/s
Local disk

32 x 6.4TB NVMe SSDs

  • 204.6 TB aggregate
  • 150 GB/s read bandwidth
Network to CS systems

24 x 100 GbE interfaces

  • 1.2 Tb/s (150 GB/s) to each Cerebras CS 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

Bridges-2

Neocortex is federated with PSC’s flagship computing system, Bridges-2, which provides users with:

  • 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 ACCESS sites, campus, labs, and clouds

 

 Acknowledgment in publications

Please use the following citation when acknowledging the use of computational time on Neocortex:

Buitrago P.A., Nystrom N.A. (2021) Neocortex and Bridges-2: A High Performance AI+HPC Ecosystem for Science, Discovery, and Societal Good. In: Nesmachnow S., Castro H., Tchernykh A. (eds) High Performance Computing. CARLA 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1327. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68035-0_15

Neocortex in action

Contact us

Email us at neocortex@psc.edu

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 2005597. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.