Meta has built a new supercomputer that will likely become the fastest AI system in the world when it is completed later this year, the company said today. The new Research SuperCluster (RSC) is already being used to train large models for natural language processing and computer vision, technologies that have broad application today and will be important for Meta’s vision for a future digital metaverse.
“The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute power (quintillions of operations / second!),” said Met founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.”
The RSC represents the next phase of digital infrastructure for Meta, which currently operates 18 data center campuses around the globe to support its Facebook, Instagran and Messenger services. These data centers represent an investment of $16 billion and more than that span 40 million square feet of space.
The RSC currently features 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems for its compute nodes, with more than 6,080 GPUs housed in more than 500 racks of equipment. The system is up and running now, but will continue to be expanded until it reaches 16,000 GPUs in 1,200 racks later this year, which will increase AI training performance by more than 2.5 times. When that goal is reached, Meta believes the RSC will be the fastest AI supercomputing system in the world.
Paving the Way for a New Computing Platform
“We hope RSC will help us build entirely new AI systems that can, for example, power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can seamlessly collaborate on a research project or play an AR game together,” Meta said in a blog post by Technical Program Manager Kevin Lee and Software Engineer Shubho Sengupta. “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.”
This video provides an overview of the RSC and its operations.