Facebook and Instagram's parent company Meta has claimed to have built one of the world's fastest supercomputers. The company said that its new artificial intelligence Research SuperCluster (RSC) supercomputer would become the world's fastest by mid-2022.
Meta said the RSC was built to run its planned metaverse, a 3D virtual world that the company claims will be the future of the internet. In a blog post unveiling the new hardware, the company said that building the metaverse will require a computer that is capable of making quintillions of operations per second.
Work on RSC was started a year and a half ago, with Meta's engineers designing all of the machine's systems from the ground up, including cooling, power, networking, and cabling. RSC's first phase is already operational, consisting of 760 Nvidia GGX A100 workstations with 6,080 connected GPUs. Meta claims that it has already increased performance on its standard machine vision research projects by up to 20 times.
Meta expects phase two of RSC to be completed by the end of 2022. It will then have 16,000 total GPUs and be capable of training AI systems with more than a trillion parameters on data sets as large as an exabyte at that time.
The social media giant said the RSC would pave the way for the development of its next-generation computing platform, where AI-driven applications and products will make social interactions possible over vast distances. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a separate post that the RSC would enable the company to create new AI models that can do unbelievable tasks such as understand hundreds of languages and process images instantly.
Zuckerberg said the RSC would help Meta develop future products such as real-time voice translators, which will allow people speaking different languages to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. He added that the technology could be used for both works and play within the metaverse.
When Meta first announced plans of creating a metaverse, experts claimed that it would take a new type of supercomputer to achieve the goal. Raja Koduri, the Vice President of Intel's accelerated computing systems and graphics department, stated that in order to power the metaverse, present computational infrastructure would need to increase by a thousand-fold.
Koduri said real-time applications would need access to petaflops of computation in less than a millisecond, less than ten milliseconds. He added that this type of computing power would be required to allow thousands of users to work, play, and socialize in a virtual space in real-time.
Rivals such as Microsoft and Nvidia have already launched their own AI supercomputers, which differ slightly from traditional supercomputers. RSC will be used to train a variety of systems across Meta's businesses, ranging from hate speech detection algorithms on Facebook and Instagram to augmented reality features that will be available in the company's future AR gear.
