Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is showing off its supercomputer and calming it will be unequivocally the fastest supercomputer in the world. The new AI Supercomputer, called the AI Research SuperCluster ( RSC ), is currently being held at an undisclosed location. The supercomputer is considered by the company as a significant step towards building the Metaverse.
The specifications of this new supercomputer are quite impressive, as the RSC currently features 760 of Nvidia’s cutting-edge DGX A100 AI compute units and includes eight Nvidia A100 GPUs in each unit. This makes for a total of 6,080 GPUs for the entire supercomputer. Once its completed, the RSC will pack a whopping 16,000 GPUs with an additional 1,240 DGX nodes to its name. They are expecting the second installation phase to be completed by July 2022.
The RSC will be completely isolated from the internet, with all connections from the internet passing through Meta’s own data servers first. This is because the supercomputer will be handing internal production data from Meta, and not just public data, making securing RSC a big concern.
The security system encrypts nearly everything from the storage systems to the GPUs. Data is only decrypted in memory just prior to being used in AI training. Once complete, RSC should have nearly 2.5 times more computing power than the current system, making it one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.
On a Facebook post back in Janurary, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “building the metaverse will require enormous computing power”. Therefore, RSC will help enable new AI models to learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages, and more.
What is the Metaverse?, I’m glad you ask. The metaverse refers to a virtual space where users can work, play, and socialize using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. Therefore, people commonly refer to the metaverse as the next iteration of the internet.
The rise of digital payment and cryptocurrency has played an important role in the popularity of the metaverse as well. For the metaverse to work, people need to own their virtual bodies, possessions, and be able to spend money. Cryptocurrency is that bridge that allows finance to happen in the metaverse world. Entering the metaverse is not going to slow down anytime soon as more and more people are being introduced to it.
