Meta Platforms Inc.
mentioned Monday that its analysis workforce constructed a brand new synthetic intelligence supercomputer that the corporate maintains will quickly be the quickest on the planet.
The supercomputer, the AI Analysis SuperCluster, was the results of almost two years of labor, typically carried out remotely through the top of the pandemic, and led by the Fb mother or father’s AI and infrastructure groups. A number of hundred folks, together with researchers from companions
Nvidia Inc.,
Penguin Computing Inc. and
Pure Storage Inc.,
had been concerned within the challenge, the corporate mentioned.
Meta, which introduced the information in a weblog publish Monday, mentioned its analysis workforce at present is utilizing the supercomputer to coach AI fashions in natural-language processing and laptop imaginative and prescient for analysis. The intention is to spice up capabilities to in the future practice fashions with greater than a trillion parameters on knowledge units as giant as an exabyte, which is roughly equal to 36,000 years of high-quality video.
“The experiences we’re constructing for the metaverse require monumental compute energy…and RSC will allow new AI fashions that may study from trillions of examples, perceive a whole lot of languages, and extra,” Meta CEO
Mark Zuckerberg
mentioned in a press release offered to The Wall Avenue Journal.
Meta’s AI supercomputer homes 6,080 Nvidia graphics-processing items, placing it fifth among the many quickest supercomputers on the planet, in accordance with Meta.
By mid-summer, when the AI Analysis SuperCluster is absolutely constructed, it would home some 16,000 GPUs, turning into the quickest AI supercomputer on the planet, Meta mentioned. The corporate declined to touch upon the placement of the power or the associated fee.
Synthetic intelligence sometimes requires computer systems to carry out a lot of low-precision calculations on the identical time. GPUs are nicely fitted to the duty as they’ve 1000’s of processing cores that may work concurrently.
“For us, it’s an order of magnitude bigger compute that’s accessible to our researchers to coach a single mannequin with much more compute than anyone else on the planet has entry to,”
Jerome Pesenti,
vp of AI at Meta, mentioned in an interview. “We imagine that this may actually unlock an AI that simply understands the world round you a lot, a lot better.”
Common supercomputers are optimized for high-precision exercise, whereas AI supercomputers function on a lot decrease ranges of precision, gaining pace with out affecting the top outcomes, mentioned Shubho Sengupta, a software program engineer at Meta who was one of many leads on the supercomputer initiative.
Excessive-performance computing infrastructure, similar to a supercomputer, is important to make sense of the volumes of information that Fb wants, mentioned Invoice Gropp, director of the Nationwide Middle for Supercomputing Purposes on the College of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“In Fb’s case, I think what they’re taking a look at is the treasure trove that they’ve of the information that they get from their customers, and that’s an enormous knowledge set, too massive for a lot of the synthetic intelligence methods that researchers sometimes use,” Dr. Gropp mentioned.
Meta’s supercomputer is getting used for analysis functions, mentioned Mr. Pesenti, with merchandise not going arising from it for years. The target is to ingest troves of information to construct AI fashions that may assume like a human mind, with a number of inputs—similar to voice and visible recognition—and may ship contextual understanding of conditions.
“You wish to have a man-made intelligence that’s much more context conscious, that understands all of the subtleties and a degree of granularity that we are able to’t match immediately,” mentioned Mr. Pesenti.
Ultimately the supercomputer will assist Meta’s researchers construct AI fashions that may work throughout a whole lot of languages, analyze textual content, photos and video collectively and develop augmented actuality instruments, the corporate mentioned. The expertise additionally will assist Meta extra simply determine dangerous content material and can intention to assist Meta researchers develop artificial-intelligence fashions that assume just like the human mind and help wealthy, multidimensional experiences within the metaverse.
“Within the metaverse, it’s a hundred percent of the time, a 3-D multi-sensorial expertise, and it is advisable create artificial-intelligence brokers in that atmosphere which might be related to you,” mentioned Mr. Pesenti.
Write to Suman Bhattacharyya at Suman.Bhattacharyya@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Firm, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
