Cerebras‘ Wafer-Scale Engine excelled at a timely scientific simulation
Tri-Labs (comprised of three major US research institutions – the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)) has been working with AI firm Cerebras on a number of scientific problems, including breaking the molecular dynamics (MD) timescale barrier.
There’s a paper explaining this particular challenge, which you can read here, but essentially it refers to the problem of conducting molecular dynamics simulations on a larger timescale than would normally be possible.
The barriers here are twofold: computational power and communication latency between different nodes of an HPC system. Traditionally, to compensate for the lack of computational power, scientists assign more work to each node and scale up the simulation size with the node count. Unfortunately, the slow inter-node communication caused by high latency further exacerbates the timescale problem.Like a donut
MD simulations are crucial to several scientific fields as they bridge the gap between quantum electronic methods and continuum mechanics methods. However, these simulations encounter timescale limitations, as they have to account for atomic vibrations, which take place over very short timescales, and other phenomena that occur over much longer periods.
