Meta and the supercomputer, what to do?

Meta, the company of Mark Zuckerberg which has, among other things, Facebook and Instagram, announced to touch the goal with its "Research SuperCluster" (RSC), a supercomputer.The machine is expected to be operational in the second half of the year, she announced on Monday, January 24.For the company, this supercomputer will be used for the development of the metarers, a virtual universe dear to the patron of Meta.

→ Investigation.The metarers, new Eldorado of Silicon Valley

The objective is to build artificial intelligence models allowing, for example, an instant translation of vocal exchanges between users.Enough to hold a multilingual meeting in a virtual cafe!Another use advanced by Meta: better moderation of videos, with an artificial intelligence capable of recognizing more quickly and more effectively problematic content.

High performance and artificial intelligence calculation

How ?By a computer striking force.A supercomputer works roughly like a huge computer.Or rather like many huge computers connected in parallel.“They are used to solve problems such as weather, nuclear fusion or even modeling new molecules against COVID-19.In recent years, they are also used for artificial intelligence, "decrypts Bérenger Bramas, specialist in high performance calculation at the Inria Center in Nancy.

"The AI mobilizes enormous volumes of data and increasingly important processing," says Pierre-François Lavallée, head of the Institute of Development and Resources in Scientific IT (IDRIS).An algorithm will analyze each data, so if you have a hundred times more data, it will take a hundred times more time.Ditto if you keep the same amount of data but want a hundred times more precise analysis."Climate models, for example, require supercomputer and remain far from being as fine as desired to correspond to reality", supports Jacques-Charles Lafourcière, responsible for high performance calculation at the CEA.

7.6 million silica hearts

Meta, rich by more than three billion users, has many data to peel.Faced with this explosion of information and the increased complexity of algorithms, the equipment must follow.For the moment, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is called Fugaku and it is Japanese.It includes 7.6 million hearts to make calculations, where, by way of comparison, office computers count between 2 and 12.

Selon les ingénieurs de Meta, la puissance du RSC le place en première position dans le palmarès des capacités de calcul. « La configuration avancée pour ce supercalculateur est de très haut niveau, confie Jacques-Charles Lafoucrière. Le communiqué évoque une puissance de calcul identique à celle qu’on attend dans les prochaines années. » Ce « Graal » porte le doux nom de « supercalculateur exaflopique » en bon français. Une telle machine qui serait capable d’effectuer 10¹⁸ opérations à la seconde, soit un milliard de milliards.

"A SuperCalculator of this type will probably be American or Japanese," says Bérenger Bramas.Europe has a lot of supercomputer but does not seek to have the most powerful of everyone.Rather, the strategy was to distribute efforts to advance many areas of research."In practice, nothing prevents an" exaflopic supercomputer "from emerging," but that has not been put into service due to very much energy consumption, "said Jacques-Charles Lafourcière."Research aims to improve treatment capacity without expanding the energy envelope."

Energy monsters

With an appetite equivalent to that of a small town, the economic and environmental cost of supercomputer is significant.Such consumption also induces a large heat emission.In Idris, south of Paris, the heat produced by the 43 tonnes of the French supercomputer Jean Zay is already reused to heat the Idris building and will soon feed more than 1,000 housing units on the Saclay plateau.

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The other problem is more technical and depends on the laws of physics.Without going into details, bringing together a large number of calculation cores requires miniaturization and therefore increasingly fine printed circuits.However, below a certain limit, computer science falls into the world of infinitely small, that of quantum.A completely different story.