Meta Says It's Building the 'World's Fastest' Supercomputer

pcmag.com:

Facebook parent company Meta this week announced work on what it believes is already "among the fastest AI supercomputers running today."

Once completed later this year, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) will be the fastest in the world, according to the company.

Boasting 6,080 graphics processing units in 760 Nvidia A100 modules, RSC is comparable to the Perlmutter supercomputer, which, as CNET noted, uses more than 6,000 of the same Nvidia GPUs and currently ranks as the world's fifth fastest supercomputer.

RSC acts as an amplifier for Meta's "next generation" of artificial intelligence, which will learn from trillions of examples; work across hundreds of languages; analyze text, images, and video together; develop new augmented reality tools, and carry out a host of other advanced tasks requiring super computer-levels of performance. "Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform—the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role," the Meta AI blog explains.

The new computing infrastructure—in the works since 2020—will allow users to more quickly train models for critical use cases like identifying harmful content (a must for social media channels). Researchers have already begun using RSC to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision.

"This research will not only help keep people safe on our services today, but also in the future, as we build for the metaverse," Meta said. "As RSC moves into its next phase, we plan for it to grow bigger and more powerful, as we begin laying the groundwork for the metaverse."

That includes AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice