Facebook parent company Meta unveiled a new supercomputer capable of building next-generation artificial intelligence infrastructure and foundational technology to boost research in the field of metaverse.
Called AI Research SuperCluster, the new machine is among the fastest AI supercomputers running today and will be the fastest AI supercomputer in the world when it is complete in mid-2022, Meta said.
The company’s researchers are using RSC to train large models in natural language processing. It will be used to build better AI models that can learn from trillions of examples, develop new augmented reality tools, work across hundreds of languages and seamlessly analyse text, images and videos together.
Using the new supercomputer, Meta aims to build a new set of AI systems that can power real-time voice translations to large groups of people, each speaking a different language, so they can collaborate on a research project or play an augmented reality game together, the company said.
Supercomputers are far more powerful than general-purpose computers and are typically used to address the most demanding problems in the world. These include developing medicine, fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, exploring oil and gas reserves, simulating nuclear weapon explosions, and forecasting weather.
“Ultimately, the work done with RSC will pave the way for building technologies for the next major computing platform – the metaverse, where AI-driven applications and products will play an important role,” Kevin Lee, RSC’s technical programme manager, and Shubho Sengupta, software engineer in the company’s AI research infra team, wrote in a blog on Monday.
To expedite its research on Metaverse, Meta launched a $50 million fund last September.
Metaverse is a digital space that allows users to communicate and move virtually in their three-dimensional avatars or digital representations. Hailed as a successor to the internet, it is a set of immersive spaces shared by users, in which they can interact, innovate and engage other people who are not in the same physical space.
RSC will let Meta fully realise the benefits of self-supervised learning and perform tasks that require the processing of large sets of data in a fraction of second. For instance, it will enhance speech recognition technology, which must work well even in challenging scenarios with lots of background noise, such as parties or concerts.
“NLP needs to understand more languages, dialects and accents … and advances in other areas, including robotics, embodied AI and multimodal AI, will help people accomplish useful tasks in the real world.
“High-performance computing infrastructure is a critical component in training large models, and Meta’s AI research team has been building these high-powered systems for many years,” said Mr Lee and Mr Sengupta.
US technology companies such as Microsoft, IBM and Google are competing to develop supercomputer technology.
In 2020, Group 42, an artificial intelligence and cloud computing company in Abu Dhabi, offered Artemis – the world’s 26th most powerful supercomputer – to researchers looking to contain the coronavirus.
Last year, Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company, and Saudi Telecom Company, the biggest telecoms operator in the kingdom by market value, launched a supercomputer, Dammam 7, that was featured among the world’s top 10 most powerful machines.
In May 2020, Microsoft announced it had built one of the top five publicly disclosed supercomputers.
Meta said it faced Covid-induced “unexpected challenges” in the development of RSC.
“Covid-19 and industry-wide wafer supply constraints brought supply chain issues that made it difficult to get everything from chips to components like optics and GPUs [graphics processing units], and even construction materials – all of which had to be transported in accordance with new safety protocols,” Mr Lee and Mr Sengupta said.
How safe is RSC?
Most of the RSC tasks, including building new AI models and creating new algorithms, involve the use of real-world data. RSC has been “designed from the ground up with privacy and security in mind”, the company said.
“RSC is isolated from the larger internet, with no direct inbound or outbound connections, and traffic can flow only from Meta’s production data centres … the entire data path is end-to-end encrypted.
“Before data is imported to RSC, it must go through a privacy review process to confirm it has been correctly anonymised,” Mr Lee and Mr Sengupta said.
RSC is up and running today, but its development is ongoing.
Currently, RSC involves 6,080 GPUs and the company aims to increase the number to 16,000. It will increase the AI training performance by more than 2.5 times.
A GPU is an electronic circuit that processes many pieces of data simultaneously.
Jetour T1 specs
Engine: 2-litre turbocharged
Power: 254hp
Torque: 390Nm
Price: From Dh126,000
Available: Now
Jumanji: The Next Level
Director: Jake Kasdan
Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, Nick Jonas
Two out of five stars
Tips to keep your car cool
- Place a sun reflector in your windshield when not driving
- Park in shaded or covered areas
- Add tint to windows
- Wrap your car to change the exterior colour
- Pick light interiors - choose colours such as beige and cream for seats and dashboard furniture
- Avoid leather interiors as these absorb more heat
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MATCH INFO
Fixture: Thailand v UAE, Tuesday, 4pm (UAE)
TV: Abu Dhabi Sports
The biog
Favourite colour: Brown
Favourite Movie: Resident Evil
Hobbies: Painting, Cooking, Imitating Voices
Favourite food: Pizza
Trivia: Was the voice of three characters in the Emirati animation, Shaabiyat Al Cartoon
Barcelona 3
Messi (27’, 32’, 87’)
Leganes 1
El Zhar (68’)
If you go
- The nearest international airport to the start of the Chuysky Trakt is in Novosibirsk. Emirates (www.emirates.com) offer codeshare flights with S7 Airlines (www.s7.ru) via Moscow for US$5,300 (Dh19,467) return including taxes. Cheaper flights are available on Flydubai and Air Astana or Aeroflot combination, flying via Astana in Kazakhstan or Moscow. Economy class tickets are available for US$650 (Dh2,400).
- The Double Tree by Hilton in Novosibirsk ( 7 383 2230100,) has double rooms from US$60 (Dh220). You can rent cabins at camp grounds or rooms in guesthouses in the towns for around US$25 (Dh90).
- The transport Minibuses run along the Chuysky Trakt but if you want to stop for sightseeing, hire a taxi from Gorno-Altaisk for about US$100 (Dh360) a day. Take a Russian phrasebook or download a translation app. Tour companies such as Altair-Tour ( 7 383 2125115 ) offer hiking and adventure packages.
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Red flags
- Promises of high, fixed or 'guaranteed' returns.
- Unregulated structured products or complex investments often used to bypass traditional safeguards.
- Lack of clear information, vague language, no access to audited financials.
- Overseas companies targeting investors in other jurisdictions - this can make legal recovery difficult.
- Hard-selling tactics - creating urgency, offering 'exclusive' deals.
Courtesy: Carol Glynn, founder of Conscious Finance Coaching
Key findings of Jenkins report
- Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna, "accepted the political utility of violence"
- Views of key Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, have “consistently been understood” as permitting “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” and “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
- Muslim Brotherhood at all levels has repeatedly defended Hamas attacks against Israel, including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians.
- Laying out the report in the House of Commons, David Cameron told MPs: "The main findings of the review support the conclusion that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism."
Film: Raid
Dir: Rajkumar Gupta
Starring: Ajay Devgn, Ileana D'cruz and Saurabh Shukla
Verdict: Three stars
UAE and Russia in numbers
UAE-Russia ties stretch back 48 years
Trade between the UAE and Russia reached Dh12.5 bn in 2018
More than 3,000 Russian companies are registered in the UAE
Around 40,000 Russians live in the UAE
The number of Russian tourists travelling to the UAE will increase to 12 percent to reach 1.6 million in 2023
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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