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Aug 25, 2021

Designing the Colossus Mk2 IPU: Simon Knowles at Hot Chips 2021

Written By:

Sally Doherty

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Addressing the Hot Chips 2021 conference, Graphcore co-founder and CTO Simon Knowles delivers a detailed technical keynote on the design and capabilities of the ColossusTM GC200 Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU).

Simon outlines the need for a specialist AI processor as a means of unlocking new directions in AI research. He also discusses the importance of sparse computation as a means of handling the multi-trillion parameter models that will be required for human-level machine intelligence.

Design features of the IPU, covered in Simon’s talk, include:

  • The GC200’s 1,472 parallel processing cores and 900MiBytes of on-die memory 
  • Graphcore’s approach to achieving ultra-high bandwidth at both chip and system level
  • Economic and performance comparison of DRAM exchange memory vs off-chip HMB 
  • Use of Bulk Synchronous Parallel for scheduling compute and communication cycles 
  • Tile design and redundancy 
  • Power usage 
  • Lessons from the Mk1 Colossus IPU 

Learn more 

WEBINAR: Enabling machine learning innovation with IPU technology 

Hot Chips 2021