Facebook unveils the world’s fastest supercomputer for its metaverse

Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled the AI Research SuperCluster which it claims will be the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Mark Zuckerberg says that the supercomputer will be critical as the experiences Meta is building on the metaverse require enormous computing power.

Facebook is taking yet another giant leap into the world of the metaverse. Through its holding company Meta, the social media giant has announced that it has launched the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), the world’s fastest supercomputer. Meta says the supercomputer will supercharge the company’s efforts into the metaverse even as competition from other tech giants heats up.

In a blog post, Facebook announced:

Today, Meta is announcing that we’ve designed and built the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) — which we believe is among the fastest AI supercomputers running today and will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the world when it’s fully built out in mid-2022.

The RSC will allow Meta to build better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples. It will be able to work across hundreds of different languages and seamlessly analyze text, video and images together.

(Graphics showing the RSC ability, courtesy of Meta.)

The latest effort by Meta comes as the race to be the leader of the metaverse heats up. Even though some leading minds like Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey and PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi have trashed the metaverse, Meta, Microsoft, Tencent and other tech giants are spending billions to become the metaverse kings.

As CNF reported, Microsoft is making the biggest bet on the metaverse, spending $69 billion to purchase Activision Blizzard, a gaming conglomerate. Activision, which is the maker of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, is Microsoft’s entry into the metaverse through the world of gaming, CEO Satya Nadella stated.

For Meta, the RSC is critical as the metaverse will require massive computing power, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says. In a Facebook post today, he stated:

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.

Meta will, for the first time, incorporate real-world data into its system to train the RSC supercomputer. Previously, the company has only used open-source and publicly-available data sets.

This is a big step for Meta, Tuomas Sandholm, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University says.

They are going to, for the first time, put their customer data on their AI research computer. That would be a really big change to give AI researchers and algorithms access to all that data.

While Meta says that it will use state-of-the-art methods to protect user data which it uses to train the RSC, the company doesn’t have the most impressive record with user data protection.

Steve Msoh