Webinar: Neocortex Spring 2023 Call for Proposals
Presented on Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 2:00 – 3:00 pm (ET), by Paola A. Buitrago, Neocortex, Principal Investigator & Project Director and Director, AI and Big Data, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center; Claire Zhang, Machine Learning Solutions Engineer at Cerebras Systems Inc.; Dr. Leighton Wilson, HPC Solutions Engineer at Cerebras Systems Inc., and Dr. Dirk Van Essendelft, HPC, AI, and Data Scientist at the National Energy Technology Laboratory.
This webinar presents the Spring 2023 Call for Proposals and gives a system overview of Neocortex, an AI-specialized NSF-funded supercomputer deployed at PSC/CMU.
For more information about Neocortex, explore the Neocortex project page. For questions about this webinar, please email neocortex@psc.edu.
Important dates and deadlines
Application begins: March. 15, 2023
Application ends: April 19, 2023 (Anywhere on earth time zone)
Response ends: May 10, 2023
Watch the webinar
| Table of Contents | |
|---|---|
|
00:00 Welcome 02:20 Intro 02:24 Speakers 05:48 The Neocortex program 14:17 Applications supported by Neocortex as of February 2023 19:46 Spring 2023 Call for Proposals 23:16 To learn more and participate 23:48 Cerebras CS-2: the AI compute engine for Neocortex. overview 26:26 Developer resources 27:29 CS-2 for Deep Learning 29:11 ML software key features 30:12 Topics of interest for ML applications 32:14 CS-2 for HPC using the stack 34:59 Cerebras SDK 39:40 Topics of interest for HPC applications 41:02 Cerebras recap 42:51 Using NETL's WFA for scientifc computing on the WSE2 44:02 What is the WFA? 47:27 Near real time scientific modeling 50:33 Seeking beta testers for scientific computing 54:26 Open Q&A |
Q&A
Will the data from users to be processed by Cerebras protected?
Data are stored and processed at PSC, and protected like all data on PSC-operated systems. Please contact neocortex@psc.edu for further explanation.
Will the user's data be publicly available? What if I have sensitive data to process and I don't want it to be made public? Does Cerebras keep a copy of the user's data or algorithms that it processes?
All the data and work takes place at PSC, none at Cerebras. Please contact neocortex@psc.edu if you need details about PSC policies.
Do density function theory simulations in computational materials science fall into the general category?
DFT should be possible in the WFA but we do not have kernels built for it. It is on the long-term development list for the WFA.
I can't click on any URLs to save them.
The recording of the webinar and slides will be made available. This is the link to access the CFP webpage.
Great effort! For the model zoo models, are they faithful reproductions of the original models? Have you done experiments to make sure the correctness of those models? Or are they still in some testing phase?
We validate all of the models released in the ModelZoo. Sometimes there exist several different implementations of the model, typically we mirror one of those. Please pay attention to the model configurations in yaml files. In our README files we also provide details about model implementation.
Is Neocortex only available for AI projects? E.g., I have a model SMNI that I am ready to apply to fMRI data.
Would TorchANI work on Neocortex? https://github.com/aiqm/torchani
It would require some porting in any case, and the ability to port dependst on the types of the models implemented in TorchANI. If the models require kernels outside of the set of existing kernels (typical components of MLPs, transformer-style models), than it won’t be possible to port it today.
If you use SLURM, does your platform permit Arrays?
We have a mainstream Slurm configuration and most of the different features supported by Slurm are permitted in the Neocortex system. There might be some slight differences, but if something doesn’t work as expected, we will be happy to work with you to solve any issues.
Is there more information on how the physical problem is actually mapped onto the machine? We have a problem that had radiative boundary conditions, and is now periodic so octrees that didn’t talk to each other now need to be right next to each other on the machine. How the compilers do this exactly isn’t entirely clear.
It’s up to you to map the physical problem to the hardware. You have to do that in the SDK or in the lower-level tools in the WFA. Problem mapping is one of the most important parts of how to code the WSE and one thing that is very different than traditional distributed computing.
Does each PE have its own memory (i.e. SRAM)?
Yes. All of them have 48KB of SRAM.
How can I get or download the slides?
The webinar recording and slides are available from this page.
I just heard that you only accept Python as a coding language? Does that mean you do not support C (e.g., gcc)?
For the SDK, our host code must be Python, at the moment, but C++ support is coming. All the code running on the wafer itself, i.e., the compute kernels, must be written with CSL.
This is for SDK. For ML, you would write code in Python and leverage Pytorch or TF.
Are real time control system applications under this architecture better using ML vs HPC?
That depends on what you mean by “better”.
Is there direct communication between the SRAM of one PE to another SRAM? Or is it a communication between PEs?
The communication is between PEs. Each PE can access its own SRAM and you can program to read data from SRAM of another PE and send it to the target PE via on-chip fabric.
Can one run DFT-based tools like VASP, Quantum espresso, etc. on this?
Not yet.
Since DFT kernels are not built, do you suggest still applying for access to Neocortex?
You could also use the SDK, and in fact, I think many DFT kernels would be a great fit. However, using the SDK will take a significant amount of effort since it’s quite low level.
I assume that any C code I have would have to be rewritten (probably not) or wait until you support C. Would the coming C++ platform be before your next deadline, or when will it likely be available?
We have yet to test integrating into larger, established C++ code bases with other dependencies, etc., so we unfortunately can’t guarantee that existing C++ code bases can integrate CSL/ SDK kernels without running into compilation issues.
Thanks for your answer, if you can point me in the direction of approaches other people have tried I’d appreciate it.
This question has been answered live at 54:52.
Why hex's instead of rectangles?
This question has been answered live at 57:55.
I understand only 32-bit floating points are available; are there (non-standard) floating point types that are 32 bits wide but have more mantissa and less exponent available?
This question has been answered live at 58:45.
I have a working Potential Neural Network (to replace DFT) modified from TorchANI and I am looking for a faster computer cluster to train it on, as the size of the data is large.
What is the recommended way participants are encouraged to allocate their development? (how long is it for)
Important dates and deadlines
Application begins: March. 15, 2023
Application ends: April 19, 2023 (Anywhere on earth time zone)
Response ends: May 10, 2023
Contact us
Email us at neocortex@psc.edu
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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.