The Meta Group (formerly Facebook) has announced that it has developed what it believes to be the world’s most powerful supercomputer. The AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) is a supercomputer whose mission will be to “train” the next AIs of the metaverse. Fasten your seatbelts, because it’s going to go very fast!
What is a supercomputer?
If you thought your last PC Gaming was an overpowered war machine, you’ve never heard of supercomputers. A supercomputer – or supercomputer to its friends – is a computer with phenomenal computing power. Designed for very specific tasks, it processes an enormous amount of data at a tremendous speed. For example, supercomputers are used to simulate the explosion of nuclear weapons.
AI Reasearch Supercluster leads the way to the metaver
On January 24, Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta Group teams announced the arrival of their newest supercomputer: the AI Research SuperCluster. Although still in development, the RSC is said to be, as of now, already much more powerful than its predecessor created in 2017.
According to information provided by Meta, the main mission of the RSC will be to process the data generated by the group’s various – and numerous – platforms, and thus be able to “train” new AIs. Focused on image and language processing, these AIs will allow :
“(…) to work in hundreds of different languages, to seamlessly analyze texts, images and videos, to develop new augmented reality tools, etc. […] The experiments we’re creating for the metaverse require enormous computational power (quintillion operations per second), and RSC will enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, understand hundreds of languages and more.”
Mark Zuckerberg
Already among the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Meta says its RSC will be fully mature by mid-2022. With 1 hexabyte of storage (36,000 years of HD video), RSC should in the coming months increase its AI learning performance by a factor of 2.5.
Finally, Meta wanted to reassure the general public and emphasized that “this is the first time that performance, reliability, security and privacy have been considered on such a large scale”. Thus, the CSR will only operate on encrypted data, which has been vetted for privacy and anonymity. With the announcement of its supercomputer, Meta affirms its position and its ambitions regarding the metaverse. By developing such tools, Mark Zuckerberg proves once again his will to build and exploit this potential new Eldorado.
