Meta has entered the supercomputer pissing contest and claims its new Research SuperCluster (RSC) will be the world’s fastest AI supercomputer when it is completed sometime around mid-2022. Wonderful.
That said, the “world’s fastest” isn’t necessarily as big a deal as Meta and Mark Zuckerberg would like you to believe. As The Verge explains, an “AI supercomputer” is a bit different than our traditional notion of a standard “supercomputer.” In a (very tiny) nutshell, the former is increasingly used in machine learning projects, and thereby doesn’t need to be as accurate as the latter technology. Not only that, but companies often like to tout their supercomputer’s top speeds as if that’s their consistent performance rate, when in reality that’s far from the case. In fact, they often barely clock in at 25 percent of their advertised speed when put to work on real projects.
