Goalthe parent company of Facebook, has confirmed that it is working on the development of one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, which according to the company itself, will be the fastest with Artificial Intelligence in the world when it is finished. If all goes well, it will be ready in the middle of this year 2022. It is called Research SuperCluster, RSC, and after its first phase of construction, already completed, it has 6,080 graphic processing units integrated into 760 Nvidia A100 modules. When its second phase of construction is complete, it will be the fastest machine built to date to perform tasks related to Artificial Intelligence.
That’s right: the development of the RSC is not going to stop, since in Meta they are already planning to expand its power and capacity in a second phase, which will take place this year. When finished, you will have 16,000 GPUs and a performance 2.5 times higher than the initial. The company will use the supercomputer for various research projects that require very high computing power.
Among them, one related to multimodal Artificial Intelligence, a type of AI that bases its conclusions on a combination of sound, images and actions instead of just one type of input data. This project, therefore, could be very relevant to address one of the main problems of Facebook: the detection of harmful content. All in all, the main use of RSC will be to help develop Meta’s main priority going forward: the Metaverse.
CSR could also help solve a particularly difficult problem in Artificial Intelligence, related to self-supervised learning. Currently, AI models are based on annotated and labeled data, and more complicated self-supervised training tasks use raw, unlabeled data, unlike more conventional models. Meta and other companies have shown that training AI models with the largest possible data sets produces better results, but doing so requires much more computing power than running AI models. Just where RSC can help.
In addition, RSC will help Meta AI researchers develop better AI models capable of learning from billions of examples. Or that they can work with hundreds of different languages; and jointly analyze text, images and video. It will also serve to promote the development of new augmented reality tools.
Its creators also hope to be able to develop Artificial Intelligence systems capable of, for example, offering real-time voice translations to large groups of people, in which people speak different languages. In this way they will be able to collaborate on research projects, and even play as a team in augmented reality environments without the need to use a common language. They will be able to do so by speaking their own, and thus open the door to the development of technologies for the metaverse, in which applications and systems powered by Artificial Intelligence will play a prominent role.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Metais sure that RSC will play a very important role in the development of the Metaverse, since «the experiences they are developing for him “need enormous computing power. RSC will allow for new Artificial Intelligence models that can learn from billions of examples or understand hundreds of languages, among other things«.
