Accelerating research and development with the RSC – Supercluster Ki-.

Accelerating research and development with the RSC – Supercluster Ki-.

San Francisco, 31.1.2020

Facebook parent company Meta announced its AI supercomputer, the world’s fifth-fastest for training machine learning systems.

The AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) will help Meta build better AI models, analyze text, images and video, develop augmented reality and metaverse tools, and accelerate AI research and development.

The RSC is helping Meta train natural language processing and computer vision models for research. It is expected to be the world’s fastest supercomputer for AI tasks once it is fully built out in mid-summer.

The machine consists of 760 Nvidia A100 modules with 6,080 graphics processing units. Meta plans to increase that number to 16,000 GPUs later this year, which will boost AI performance by 2.5 times.

At that point, the machine will be able to „perform nearly 5 exaflops of mixed precision computation.“ It will be able to train large natural language processing models three times faster and run computer vision workflows 20 times faster than Meta’s 2017 Nvidia machine.

According to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the RSC will enable AI models that can understand hundreds of languages and learn from trillions of examples. It will provide experience for the company’s Metaverse plans, which require computing power of five trillion operations per second, Zuckerberg said.

The supercomputer was developed over two years with partners Nvidia Inc, Penguin Computing Inc and Pure Storage Inc.

Meta did not say how much the machine cost to build or where it is located.