Accelerating Scientific Applications With SambaNova Reconfigurable Dataflow Architecture

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), a US Department of Energy Office of Science user facility, provides supercomputing resources to power scientific breakthroughs. Applications with significant deep learning (DL) components are increasingly being run on existing supercomputers at the facility. Scientists at ALCF are exploring novel artificial intelligence (AI)-hardware systems, such as SambaNova, in an attempt to address the challenges in scaling the performance of AI models. SambaNova reconfigurable dataflow unit (RDU) is a next-generation processor designed to provide native dataflow processing and programmable acceleration. It has a tiled architecture that comprises a network of reconfigurable functional units. The architecture enables a broad set of highly parallelizable patterns contained within dataflow graphs to be efficiently programmed as a combination of compute, memory, and communication networks.