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.
