We talked earlier in January about Graphcore systems at the University of Bristol and the reasons why the university selected their architecture here and now have more details on the collaboration with CERN that is showcasing what Graphcore’s MIMD-based IPU accelerators can do at scale in one of the most intense real-time HPC environments. Based on work with the Bristol research team, for particle physics work at CERN, their own tests indicate that “the IPUs hold considerable promise in addressing the rapidly increasing compute needs in particle physics.”
Part of what is interesting about the Graphcore, CERN work is that new workloads are being explored, including the use of generative adversarial networks (GANs) to essentially fill in pieces of missing information and use data from simulation to aid in the synthesis of ongoing workloads. Much of the CERN/Graphcore/Bristol evaluation is focused on GANs given its growing role at the particle physics facility.