Meta is Building New Supercomputer With 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs

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A monster GPU for a trillion-dollar company

Super computer artistic rendering
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

Meta (previously known as Facebook) is building a new AI supercomputer, called the AI Research SuperCluster, at a currently undisclosed location. According to Meta, it'll be the world's fastest supercomputer to date when complete with a performance metric of over 220 Linpack petaflops. RSC is operational right now but is still being built out.

Specs for this new supercomputer are quite impressive, as the RSC currently features 760 of Nvidia's cutting-edge DGX A100 AI compute units and includes eight Nvidia A100 GPUs in each unit. This makes for a total of 6,080 GPUs for the entire supercomputer. But, once complete, RSC will pack a whopping 16,000 GPUs with an additional 1,240 DGX nodes to its name. The second installation phase will be completed sometime in July.

For networking, the supercomputer will come equipped with Nvidia's Quantum InfiniBand networking system, which outputs up to 200Gb/s of bandwidth. For storage, the supercomputer comes with 175PB of Pure Storage FlashArray, 10PB of Pure Storage FlashBlade, and 46PB of cache storage.

The RSC will be completely isolated from the internet, with all connections from the internet passing through Meta's own data servers first. This is because the supercomputer will be handing internal production data from Meta, and not just public data, making securing RSC a big concern.

The security system encrypts nearly everything from the storage systems to the GPUs. Data is only decrypted in memory just prior to being used in AI training.

Once complete, RSC should have nearly 2.5 times more computing power than the current system, making it one of the fastest supercomputers in the world.

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hotaru251
    ah yes the #1 company you shouldnt trust with a super computer....for a new generation second life.

    Personally hope it fails and only good part that comes of it is making VR more mainstream.
    Reply
  • jacob249358
    im gonna hack it and delete facebook moms account
    Reply
  • Giroro
    I'm pretty dubious of this whole Meta thing. They're selling "virtual real estate", right?
    That whole business model so far seems to be "What if Evergrande was an NFT".

    Or maybe more like "what if a MLM was selling an imaginary product".

    Either way, it basically seems like the kind of thing where "it's almost certainly illegal to take money for this, but nobody can figure out which law applies".

    I mean, surely people will eventually figure out that it's a bad idea to "invest" in an imaginary internet number that can be infinitely copied forever, for free... Right?
    Has anyone played that game where you repeatedly type "+1" into a calculator to see how high the number can go? It stops being fun once you realize anybody can just type any number you want into that thing.
    You boil meta down far enough and that's all it is, a number in a calculator. They can change the number whenever they want, and eventually they'll turn it all off.

    These social media companies all act like abusive boyfriends or cult leaders. They try to break you down and neg you into craving their approval. You're both the worker and the product, and they expect you to pay them for the privilege. All for what? Because they package up the top 0.000001% of their users into influencers and sell them off to their advertisers? Its a harmful fantasy, more damaging than pornography - which we keep away from kids for a reason.

    But most importantly, I don't want to be tricked into living my life inside a kid-friendly Facebook ad with bad art design.
    I can't even tolerate the idea that the company expects keep complete control over the oculus hardware that they Zucker you into "buying".
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    Giroro said:
    I'm pretty dubious of this whole Meta thing. They're selling "virtual real estate", right?
    Second Life does that.
    you pay real $ for digital land/clothes/etc.


    Metaverse is zuck's attempt at drawing in the young ppl and the attraction to VR of late.
    Reply
  • Giroro
    hotaru251 said:
    Second Life does that.
    you pay real $ for digital land/clothes/etc

    That is also a problem, but most people at least realized that buying stuff in second life was dumb. I'm not sure, but I don't think many people were being told that buying lingerie in second life was an investment in an assest that would grow in value.

    A big difference though, is that (as far as I know), Second Life doesn't have the real names, precise locations, contacts, photos, employment history, DMs, and compete internet history of an actual 4 Billion people.
    Meta could blackmail anybody, anywhere, whenever they want. People with power are going to shove this down our throats so hard.
    Reply