Meta, the tech giant previously known as Facebook, revealed Monday that it’s built one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, a behemoth called the Research SuperCluster, or RSC. With 6,080 graphics processing units packaged into 760 Nvidia A100 modules, it’s the fastest machine built for AI tasks, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says.
That processing power is in the same league as the Perlmutter supercomputer, which uses more than 6,000 of the same Nvidia GPUs and currently ranks as the world’s fifth fastest supercomputer. And in a second phase, Meta plans to boost performance by a factor of 2.5 with an expansion to 16,000 GPUs this year.
Meta, a top AI researcher, hopes the investment will pay off by using RSC to help build out the company’s latest priority: the virtual realm it calls the metaverse. RSC could be powerful enough to simultaneously translate speech for a large group of individuals who each speak a different language.
“The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute power,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages and more.”
