Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), stating the supercomputer is already operational and nearing completion.
According to the company, this project is set to “pave the way toward building technologies for the next major computing platform” – namely, the metaverse.
The RSC was unveiled in a blog post released on Jan 24th. The post states that the supercomputer is expected to be the fastest in the world by its estimated completion date in mid-2022. This technology is already being used for research, including training large models in natural language processing.
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RSC will help Meta’s AI researchers build new and better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples; work across hundreds of different languages; seamlessly analyze text, images, and video together; develop new augmented reality tools; and much more.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg also shared the news about the RSC supercomputer on his account, congratulating the team, reinstating that it would “enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.”
The Meta blog post has shared the specs of the RSC as it stands today. These include 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems, with a total of 6080 GPUs. It’s estimated that the RSC will use 16,000 GPUs in the connection as endpoints by its completion.
Zuckerberg seconded the operational power of the supercomputer, stating that it would handle “quintillions of operations / second”.
The supercomputer is being developed with the highest measures for privacy and security in mind. According to the blog post, the RSC is completely isolated from the larger internet, and all the traffic flows exclusively from Meta’s production data centers.
The RSC supercomputer is expected to play a major role in the metaverse. After Facebook’s rebranding to Meta back in October 2021, the company revealed its plans to develop its own metaverse system, going beyond the conventional social media platforms.
We expect such a step function change in compute capability to enable us not only to create more accurate AI models for our existing services, but also to enable completely new user experiences, especially in the metaverse.
The metaverse—a virtual space involving a number of software and hardware developments, from VR glasses to games and even AR workspaces—is Meta’s target project in the foreseeable future. The RSC would help process the massive amounts of data required for a metaverse to run smoothly.
All eyes aren’t turning only on Meta. Tech giant NVIDIA will also be likely winning big from this collaboration, being chosen as the sole GPU provider for the RSC project.
