Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in accelerating artificial intelligence (AI) compute, today announced its international expansion in Canada with the opening of its Toronto office. The regional office, which will be focused on accelerating the company’s R&D efforts and establishing an AI centre of excellence, will be led by local technology industry veteran Nish Sinnadurai. With more than fifteen engineers currently employed, Cerebras plans to triple its Toronto engineering team in the coming year.
“Canada is a hotbed of technology innovation, and we look forward to driving AI compute excellence throughout the province of Ontario,” said Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras. “We are excited to grow our presence in the region and to attract, hire and develop top local talent in high-performance computing and AI.”
“I am pleased that Cerebras has chosen to open a Toronto office to take advantage of the local technology and engineering talent and regional growth opportunities,” said John Tory, Mayor of Toronto. “We welcome and celebrate Cerebras’ expansion as the company fosters AI growth and innovation in the Toronto Region.”
Throughout their due diligence and expansion process, Cerebras System worked closely with Toronto Global, a team of experienced business advisors assisting global businesses to expand into the Toronto Region, as well as with the office of the Ontario Senior Economic Officer based in San Francisco.
Nish Sinnadurai will serve as Toronto Site Lead and Director of Software Engineering. Nish comes to Cerebras Systems with deep technical engineering expertise, having previously served as Director of Software Engineering at the Intel Toronto Technology Centre, where he led a multi-disciplinary organization developing large-scale, high-performance software for state-of-the-art systems. Prior to that, he held various roles at Altera (acquired by Intel) and Research in Motion Ltd (now Blackberry).
“I am honored to join the Cerebras team and work alongside a group of world-class engineers who have invented a one-of-a-kind technology with the Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) and CS-1 system, one of the fastest AI computers ever made,” said Nish. “I look forward to helping push the boundaries of AI and machine learning and define the future of computing with our talented team in Toronto.”
In November 2019, Cerebras announced Cerebras CS-1, the industry’s fastest AI computer, which was recently selected as one of Fast Company’s Best World Changing Ideas and a winner of IEEE Spectrum’s Emerging Technology Awards. Cerebras also recently announced CS-1 deployments at some of the largest computer facilities in the U.S., including Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for its groundbreaking Neocortex AI supercomputer.
Cerebras’ flagship product, the CS-1, is powered by Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), which is the industry’s first and only wafer scale processor. The WSE contains 400,000 AI optimized compute cores, more than one trillion transistors and measures 46,225 millimeters square. The CS-1 system is also comprised of the CS-1 enclosure, which is a complete computer system and delivers power, cooling and data to the WSE; and the Cerebras software platform, which makes the solution quick to deploy and easy to use. These technologies combine to make the CS-1 the highest performing AI accelerator ever built, allowing AI researchers to use their existing software models without modification.