Facebook unveils its new metaverse supercomputer

Meta presented its next supercomputer for the metaverse on Monday January 24th. According to the group, he will be the fastest in the world.

Meta, formerly Facebook, officially unveiled its new supercomputer on Monday, January 24. The company has been working on the latter for two years now. It has 1000 billion different parameters and an exabyte of data or 36,000 years of HD video. Meta proudly announces that this new supercomputer would be the fastest in the world.

With a calculation speed of 5 exaflops per second, it will be more efficient than the Japanese supercomputer Fugaku, 1^st supercomputer in the top500 world reference ranking.

The AI ​​Research SuperCluster (RSC) is therefore the name of Meta's new supercomputer. The company has given itself five years to design this “new Internet” with the aim of crossing the border between real and virtual. It is for this purpose that the RSC was designed, in order to develop and train new AI models on a machine capable of supporting them.

Before this new supercomputer, the old one used by Facebook dated back to 2017. During the pandemic in early 2020, the group focused on building a more efficient supercomputer. Phase 1 is now ready since the installation of the first storage bays.

According to Meta, the RSC supercomputer will nearly triple its capacity by July. It will carry 16,000 Nvidia-branded graphics processors, compared to 6,000 today. Thanks to its technical sheet, RSC will be able to finish training an AI model in three weeks compared to nine previously. Facebook says, "No project of this complexity has ever been done in the world of high-performance computing."

RSC will also allow Meta to manage no less than 1000 billion parameters in the different AI models: text, videos, images etc. Advances in AI require more and more powerful machines just like for the metaverse.

With RSC, Meta intends to position itself as a scientific champion. The AI ​​is responsible in particular for using image or text recognition, in order to remove terrorist, pornographic or violent content from the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg's group has not disclosed the amount spent on this new supercomputer, however, we know that in 2020, the firm invested more than $18 billion in the R&D sector.