Meta Developed One of the Fastest Supercomputers 

Facebook’s parent company Meta made an important announcement. The social media giant announced that it developed the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC). Meta says its supercomputer is already among the fastest machines of its type, when complete in mid-2022, will be the world’s fastest supercomputer.

Meta and its rivals understand the importance of supercomputers. Its rivals Nvidia and Microsoft already announced their own “AI supercomputers” which are slightly different from what we think of as regular supercomputers. 

Meta’s supercomputer will enable new AI models to learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more. It also will be used to design experiences for the metaverse. 

Meta, its supercomputer, and technical aspects 

The company’s engineers designed Meta’s supercomputer from start to finish. Besides, phase one of the RSC is already up and running. The first phase consists of 760 Nvidia GGX A100 systems, which contain 6,000 connected GPUs. Meta stated that it is already providing up to 20 times improved performance on its standard machine vision research tasks. 

Meta plans to finish phase two of RSC before the end of 2022. By that time, RSC will contain some 16,000 total GPUs. Its supercomputer will be able to train AI systems “with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as exabyte”.

Facebook is no stranger to scandals, to say the least. Over the past several years, the social media giant received several backlashes on its privacy as well as data policies. Facebook’s parent company wants to tackle security and privacy issues from the get-go. Meta stated that it safeguards data in RSC by designing RSC from the ground up with privacy and security in mind. It claims this will enable its researchers to safely train models using encrypted user-generated data that is not decrypted until right before the training.