New AI supercomputer is so powerful it can do 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second

The Andromeda supercomputer is particularly powerful with language (Cerebras)
The Andromeda supercomputer is particularly powerful with language. (Cerebras)

A new supercomputer optimised for artificial intelligence (AI) that can perform a quintillion calculations per second has been unveiled.

Developed by chip company Cerebras, Andromeda has 13.5 million processor cores and can deliver an 'exaflop' of AI computing power.

It’s particularly powerful at mimicking natural human language and customers have suggested it could write advertising copy – and even books.

'Exascale' computing is the threshold of a quintillion – 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 – calculations per second, known as 'exaflops'.

Exascale computing will be used by scientists to make more accurate predictions in areas such as weather forecasting and climate modelling.

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Many researchers hope exascale computers will be able to simulate the operation of the human brain, something beyond previous generations of supercomputers.

Andromeda can also perform 120 Petaflops at 16-bit half precision, which is used for image processing, and will be particularly useful on language models where AI mimics human speech.

It features as many cores as the largest supercomputer in the world, Frontier, which has 8.7 million cores.

Access to Andromeda is available now, and customers and academic researchers are already running real workloads.

Dave Rogenmoser, CEO of JasperAI, said: "Jasper uses large language models to write copy for marketing, ads, books and more. We have over 85,000 customers who use our models to generate moving content and ideas.

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"Given our large and growing customer base, we're exploring testing and scaling models fit to each customer and their use cases. Creating complex new AI systems and bringing it to customers at increasing levels of granularity demands a lot from our infrastructure.

"We are thrilled to partner with Cerebras and leverage Andromeda's performance and near perfect scaling without traditional distributed computing and parallel programming pains to design and optimise our next set of models."

Andromeda is deployed in 16 racks at Colovore, a leading high-performance data centre in Santa Clara, California.

The 16 CS-2 systems, with a combined 13.5 million AI optimised cores are fed by 284 64-core AMD third generation EPYC processors.

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