Wafer-Scale Systems: A Carbon Perspective

The rapid rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has prompted a re-evaluation of system architecture design, making energy efficiency and sustainability more crucial than ever. Recently, wafer-scale architectures have emerged as a viable alternative for LLM training and inference, as evidenced by the success of Cerebras Systems. In this work, we examine the carbon implications of wafer-scale architectures as compared to traditional GPUs. As a case study, we examine LLMs on a Cerebras CS-3 system in order to quantify power and total carbon. Then, we analyze total carbon delay product (tCDP) to evaluate the carbon efficiency and performance potential of these systems. We take the first step towards exploring this trade-off for wafer-scale versus traditional GPU architectures - and ultimately find there exists a rich design space, depending on workload and hardware configuration.