  Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have transformed our understanding of the
nanoscale, driving breakthroughs in materials science, computational chemistry,
and several other fields, including biophysics and drug design. Even on
exascale supercomputers, however, runtimes are excessive for systems and
timescales of scientific interest. Here, we demonstrate strong scaling of MD
simulations on the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine. By dedicating a processor core
for each simulated atom, we demonstrate a 179-fold improvement in timesteps per
second versus the Frontier GPU-based Exascale platform, along with a large
improvement in timesteps per unit energy. Reducing every year of runtime to two
days unlocks currently inaccessible timescales of slow microstructure
transformation processes that are critical for understanding material behavior
and function. Our dataflow algorithm runs Embedded Atom Method (EAM)
simulations at rates over 270,000 timesteps per second for problems with up to
800k atoms. This demonstrated performance is unprecedented for general-purpose
processing cores.
