Facebook owner needs 16,000 GPUs, 4,000 Epyc processors – good luck, everyone else
Facebook owner Meta is building the world’s largest AI supercomputer to power machine-learning research that will bring the metaverse to life in the future, it claimed on Monday. The new super – dubbed the Research Super Computer, or RSC – will contain 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 4,000 AMD Epyc Rome 7742 processors. Each compute node is an Nvidia DGX-A100 system, containing eight GPU chips and two Epyc microprocessors, totaling 2,000 nodes. It’s expected to hit a peak performance of 5 exaFLOPS at mixed precision – FP16 and FP32 – and use a data-caching system that can feed in 16 terabytes per second of training information from 1EB of storage, we’re told. RSC is being built with the help of Penguin Computing, a HPC supplier based in California, who will provide the infrastructure and managed security. „Meta has developed what we believe is the world’s fastest AI supercomputer,“ CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement to The Register. „We’re calling it RSC for AI Research SuperCluster and it’ll be complete later this year. 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.
