Disruptive Changes in Field Equation Modeling: A Simple Interface for Wafer Scale Engines

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2209.13768
• Publication Date: 2022-01-01
• Authors: Woo, Mino; Jordan, Terry; Schreiber, Robert; Sharapov, Ilya; Muhammad, Shaheer; Koneru, Abhishek; James, Michael; Van Essendelft, Dirk
• Keywords: FOS: Computer and information sciences; J.2; Computer Science - Performance; I.6; 01 natural sciences; J.2; I.6; Performance (cs.PF); Computer Science - Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing; Hardware Architecture (cs.AR); Computer Science - Mathematical Software; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); 0101 mathematics; Computer Science - Hardware Architecture; Mathematical Software (cs.MS)

We present a high-level and accessible Application Programming Interface (API) for the solution of field equations on the Cerebras Systems Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) with over two orders of magnitude performance gain relative to traditional distributed computing approaches. The domain-specific API is called the WSE Field-equation API (WFA). The WFA outperforms OpenFOAM on NETL's Joule 2.0 supercomputer by over two orders of magnitude in time to solution. While this performance is consistent with hand-optimized assembly codes, the WFA provides an easy-to-use, high-level Python interface that allows users to form and solve field equations effortlessly. We report here the WFA programming methodology and achieved performance on the latest generation of WSE, the CS-2.<br/>22 pages, 5 figures, 2 Tables<br/>