Meta claims to have the world's fastest AI supercomputer

Meta has released the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), calling it one of the fastest AI supercomputers running presently in the world. The development of the RSC is ongoing, but once the second phase is completed by the second half of this year, the system will deliver nearly 5 exaflops of mixed-precision computing.

RSC will work across hundreds of different languages, analyse text, images and video together, which will help in building better AI models. Currently, RSC comprises a total of 760 Nvidia DGX A100 systems as its compute nodes, for a total of 6,080 GPUs linked on an NVIDIA Quantum 200Gb/s InfiniBand network to give 1,895 petaflops of TF32 performance.

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is already using the supercomputer to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision for research. The company uses large-scale AI models for ongoing priorities, such as detecting harmful content on its social platforms.

While its previous AI research infrastructure used only open source and other publicly available data sets, RSC includes privacy and security controls that will allow it to teach models with real-world data from Meta's production systems.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, while introducing RSC, said in a statement, “The experiences we’re building for the metaverse require enormous compute power (quintillions of operations/second!) and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.”