Science and technology

🔆THE AI RESEARCH SUPERCLUSTER (RSC)

✅Meta announced in January 2022 that it is building an AI supercomputer, the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC).

✅Meta considers the RSC as a powerful supercomputer capable of quintillions of operations per second. It can perform tasks like translating text between languages and help identify potentially harmful content on Meta's platform.

✅The RSC, compared with Meta’s legacy production and research infrastructure, can run computer vision workflows up to 20 times faster, and train large-scale natural language processing (NLP) models three times faster.

✅Meta estimates that a model with billions of parameters can finish training in three weeks, compared to the nine weeks it was before.

✅RSC today comprises a total of 760 NVIDIA DGX A100 systems as its compute nodes, for a total of 6,080 GPUs.

✅RSC’s storage tier has 175 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashArray, 46 petabytes of cache storage in Penguin Computing Altus systems, and 10 petabytes of Pure Storage FlashBlade.

▪️Supercomputers?

✅A supercomputer can perform high-level processing at a faster rate when compared to a normal computer.

✅Supercomputers are made up of hundreds or thousands of powerful machines which use better artificial intelligence (AI) models to improve operations that process huge amounts of data in less time than normal computers.

✅Supercomputers require high-speed and specialised chip architectures. The chip performs 660 operations per cycle and thus run up to 230 gigaflops at 350 MHz.

✅AI supercomputers are built by combining multiple graphic processing units (GPUs) into compute nodes, which are then connected by a high-performance network fabric to allow fast communication between those GPUs.

◾️What is SWIFT and why is Russia being threatened with its exclusion?

✅As tensions peaks over Ukraine the United States could exclude Russia from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

◾️What is SWIFT?

✅SWIFT is an international network for banks worldwide to facilitate smooth money transactions globally.

✅It is basically a messaging network used by banks and financial institutions globally for quick and faultless exchange of information pertaining to financial transactions.

✅The Belgium-headquartered SWIFT connects more than 11,000 banking and securities organization in over 200 countries and territories.

✅First used in 1973, it went live in 1977 with 518 institutions from 22 countries, its website states.

◾️What exactly is it?

✅SWIFT is merely a platform that sends messages and does not hold any securities or money.

✅It facilitates standardized and reliable communication to facilitate the transaction.

◾️How does it facilitate banking?

✅Each participant on the platform is assigned a unique eight-digit SWIFT code or a bank identification code (BIC).

✅If a person, say, in New York with a Citibank account, wants to send money to someone with an HSBC account in London, the payee would have to submit to his bank the London-based beneficiary’s account number along with the eight-digit SWIFT code of the latter’s bank.

✅Citibank would then send a SWIFT message to HSBC. Once that is received and approved, the money would be credited to the required account.

◾️What happens if one is excluded from SWIFT?

✅US excluding Russia from SWIFT could have serious repercussions on how Russian banks carry out international financial transactions.

✅If a country is excluded from the most participatory financial facilitating platform, its foreign funding would take a hit, making it entirely reliant on domestic investors.

✅This is particularly troublesome when institutional investors are constantly seeking new markets in newer territories.

✅An alternative system would be cumbersome to build and even more difficult to integrate with an already expansive system.

🔆Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

◾️How does it facilitate banking?

✅Each participant on the platform is assigned a unique eight-digit SWIFT code or a bank identification code (BIC).

✅If a person, say, in New York with a Citibank account, wants to send money to someone with an HSBC account in London, the payee would have to submit to his bank the London-based beneficiary’s account number along with the eight-digit SWIFT code of the latter’s bank.

✅Citibank would then send a SWIFT message to HSBC. Once that is received and approved, the money would be credited to the required account.