Making breakthroughs in artificial intelligence today requires big quantities of computing energy. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that by the top of this 12 months, the corporate could have put in 350,000 Nvidia GPUs—the specialised pc chips used to coach AI fashions—to energy its AI analysis.
As a data-center community engineer with Meta’s community infrastructure group, Susana Contrerais enjoying a number one function on this unprecedented know-how rollout. Her job is about “bringing designs to life,” she says. Contrera and her colleagues take high-level plans for the corporate’s AI infrastructure and switch these blueprints into actuality by figuring out easy methods to wire, energy, cool, and home the GPUs within the firm’s knowledge facilities.
Susana Contrera
Employer:
Meta
Occupation:
Information-center community engineer
Schooling:
Bachelor’s diploma in telecommunications engineering, Andrés Bello Catholic College in Caracas, Venezuela
Contrera, who now works remotely from Florida, has been at Meta since 2013, spending most of that point serving to to construct the pc techniques that help its social media networks, together with Facebook and Instagram. However she says that AI infrastructure has turn out to be a rising precedence, significantly up to now two years, and represents a completely new problem. Not solely is Meta constructing among the world’s first AI supercomputers, it’s racing towards different firms like Google and OpenAI to be the primary to make breakthroughs.
“We’re sitting proper on the forefront of the know-how,” Contrera says. “It’s tremendous difficult, nevertheless it’s additionally tremendous fascinating, since you see all these individuals pushing the boundaries of what we thought we may do.”
Cisco Certification Opened Doorways
Rising up in Caracas, Venezuela, Contrera says her first introduction to know-how got here from enjoying video video games together with her older brother. However she determined to pursue a profession in engineering due to her mother and father, who had been small-business homeowners.
“They had been all the time telling me how know-how was going to be a recreation changer sooner or later, and the way a profession in engineering may open many doorways,” she says.
She enrolled at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas in 2001 to check telecommunications engineering. In her remaining 12 months, she signed up for the coaching and certification program to turn out to be a Cisco Certified Network Associate. This system lined matters similar to the basics of networking and safety, IP companies, and automation and programmability.
The certificates opened the door to her first job in 2006—managing the pc community of a business-process outsourcing firm, Atento, in Caracas.
“Getting your arms soiled may give you plenty of perspective.”
“It was a really massive enterprise community that had simply the correct quantity of complexity for a really small group,” she says. “That gave me plenty of freedom to place my information into follow.”
On the time, Venezuela was going by a interval of political unrest. Contrera says she didn’t see a future for herself within the nation, so she determined to go away for Europe.
She enrolled in a grasp’s diploma program in mission administration in 2009 at Spain’s Pontifical University of Salamanca, persevering with to gather further certifications by Cisco in her free time. In 2010, partway by this system, she left for a job as a help engineer on the Madrid-based legislation agency Ecija, which gives authorized recommendation to know-how, media, and telecommunications firms. Following that with a stint as a community engineer at Amazon’s facility in Dublin from 2011 to 2013, she then joined Meta and “the remaining is historical past,” she says.
Beginning From the Edge Community
Contrera first joined Meta as a community deployment engineer, serving to construct the corporate’s “edge” community. In such a community design, person requests exit to small edge servers dotted world wide as a substitute of to Meta’s important knowledge facilities. Edge techniques can cope with requests quicker and cut back the load on the corporate’s important computer systems.
After a number of years touring round Europe establishing this infrastructure, she took a managerial place in 2016. However after a few years she determined to return to a hands-on function on the firm.
“I missed the satisfaction that you just get once you’re a part of a mission, and you may clearly see the influence of fixing a posh technical drawback,” she says.
Due to the fast progress of Meta’s companies, her work primarily concerned scaling up the capability of its knowledge facilities as shortly as potential and boosting the effectivity with which knowledge flowed by the community. However the work she is doing immediately to construct out Meta’s AI infrastructure presents very completely different challenges, she says.
Designing Information Facilities for AI
Coaching Meta’s largest AI fashions includes coordinating computation over massive numbers of GPUs break up into clusters. These clusters are sometimes housed in numerous amenities, usually in distant cities. It’s essential that messages passing backwards and forwards have very low latency and are lossless—in different phrases, they transfer quick and don’t drop any info.
Constructing knowledge facilities that may meet these necessities first includes Meta’s community engineering group deciding what sort of {hardware} must be used and the way it must be related.
“They’ve to consider how these clusters look from a logical perspective,” Contrera says.
Then Contrera and different members of the community infrastructure group take this plan and work out easy methods to match it into Meta’s present knowledge facilities. They contemplate how a lot house the {hardware} wants, how a lot energy and cooling it would require, and easy methods to adapt the communications techniques to help the extra knowledge visitors it would generate. Crucially, this AI {hardware} sits in the identical amenities as the remainder of Meta’s computing {hardware}, so the engineers have to verify it doesn’t take assets away from different essential companies.
“We assist translate these concepts into the true world,” Contrera says. “And we’ve to verify they match not solely immediately, however additionally they make sense for the long-term plans of how we’re scaling our infrastructure.”
Engaged on a Transformative Know-how
Planning for the longer term is especially difficult on the subject of AI, Contrera says, as a result of the sector is shifting so shortly.
“It’s not like there’s a highway map of how AI goes to look within the subsequent 5 years,” she says. “So we typically must adapt shortly to modifications.”
With immediately’s heated competitors amongst firms to be the primary to make AI advances, there may be plenty of stress to get the AI computing infrastructure up and operating. This makes the work rather more demanding, she says, nevertheless it’s additionally energizing to see your entire firm rallying round this objective.
Whereas she typically will get misplaced within the day-to-day of the job, she loves engaged on a probably transformative know-how. “It’s fairly thrilling to see the probabilities and to know that we’re a tiny piece of that massive puzzle,” she says.
Fingers-on Information Middle Expertise
For these thinking about turning into a community engineer, Contrera says the certification applications run by firms like Cisco are helpful. However she says it’s additionally essential to not focus simply on merely ticking packing containers or dashing by programs simply to earn credentials. “Take your time to grasp the matters as a result of that’s the place the worth is,” she says.
It’s good to get some expertise working in knowledge facilities on infrastructure deployment, she says, as a result of “getting your arms soiled may give you plenty of perspective.” And more and more, coding will be one other helpful talent to develop to enhance extra conventional community engineering capabilities.
Primarily, she says, simply “benefit from the journey” as a result of networking generally is a really fascinating subject when you delve in. “There’s this orchestra of protocols and completely different applied sciences enjoying collectively and interacting,” she says. “I believe that’s stunning.”
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