Titled the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC), Meta believes it will be the fastest in the world and will help to build out the Metaverse.
The goal for this supercomputer seems to be to accelerate AI research and help to build the Metaverse. Meta claims that at current speeds, it's already one of the fastest in the world, and that by the time it is fully built-out in mid-2022 it will be the fastest.
Some key tasks identified by Meta include identifying harmful content and language translations, and creating powerful new AR tools. Training AI for these tasks requires very large data sets and very substantial computing power. This advanced AI infrastructure is also designed to be able to seamlessly work with images, sounds, actions, and other input sources.
Meta highlights that AI analysis of these multimodal input signals (computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition) is a prerequisite for a safe Metaverse, as identifying harmful content is a huge challenge yet also a necessity.
Meta also anticipates that many of the future applications for AR and the Metaverse will be powered by AI. The areas of research that they are actively pursuing include robotics, embodied AI, and multimodal AI.
Meta has also taken advantage of the latest GPU hardware and networking technology with this project, and aims to be able to process Exabyte sized datasets. The RSC uses NVIDIA DGX A100 AI compute systems and at time of completion will have 16,000 GPUs. It will be networked with Infiniband fiber technology at 1600Gb/s. Its memory and storage is comprised of 175 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashArray, 46 petabytes of cache storage in Penguin Computing Altus systems, and 10 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashBlade.
Sources:
https://ai.facebook.com/blog/ai-rsc