The National Energy Technology Laboratory collaborated with Cerebras Systems, a startup that develops artificial intelligence computing technology, to create a wafer scale-based programming interface for research project simulations.
NETL said Tuesday the Wafer-scale Engine Field Equation Application, or WFA, has the potential to expedite the generation of simulation data using less amounts of energy.
Cerebras is the designer of this wafer-scale engine, which has proven to be 1,500 times more energy efficient than existing computing technologies used in research.
Laboratory scientists were able to demonstrate that the WFA can streamline computational fluid dynamic projects by helping to break down memory and network firewalls during the process.
“We began to make a general-purpose tensor algebra library that could support CFD on the WSE. This library eventually became known as the WFA,” said Dirk Van Essendelft, an NETL researcher.
“Applications for WFA include materials modeling, molecular dynamics and AI-accelerated scientific modeling, among others,” Essendelft informed.
The partnership is working to implement the WFA in commercial applications.