[...] Read More... The post Building new custom silicon for Meta’s AI workloads appeared first on Engineering at Meta. | Continue reading
Meta’s family of apps serves trillions of image download requests every day. And if you’re into high-quality images, you’ve probably noticed that Instagram and Threads have added support for high dynamic range (HDR) photos. Now people on Threads and Instagram can upload and share … | Continue reading
Threads has entered the fediverse! As part of our beta experience, Threads users aged 18+ with public profiles can now choose to share their Threads posts to other ActivityPub-compliant servers. People on those servers can now follow federated Threads profiles and see, like, repl … | Continue reading
Bandwidth estimation (BWE) and congestion control play an important role in delivering high-quality real-time communication (RTC) across Meta’s family of apps. We’ve adopted a machine learning (ML)-based approach that allows us to solve networking problems holistically across cro … | Continue reading
At Meta, we support real-time communication (RTC) for billions of people through our apps, including Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. We’ve seen significant benefits by adopting the AV1 codec for RTC. Here’s how we are improving the RTC video quality for our apps with tools li … | Continue reading
Systems and application logs play a key role in operations, observability, and debugging workflows at Meta. Logarithm is a hosted, serverless, multitenant service, used only internally at Meta, that consumes and indexes these logs and provides an interactive query interface to re … | Continue reading
Marking a major investment in Meta’s AI future, we are announcing two 24k GPU clusters. We are sharing details on the hardware, network, storage, design, performance, and software that help us extract high throughput and reliability for various AI workloads. We use this cluster d … | Continue reading
To comply with a new EU law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which comes into force on March 7th, we’ve made major changes to WhatsApp and Messenger to enable interoperability with third-party messaging services. We’re sharing how we enabled third-party interoperability (interop) … | Continue reading
Andres Suarez and Michael Bolin, two software engineers at Meta, join Pascal Hartig (@passy) on the Meta Tech Podcast to discuss the ins and outs of DotSlash, a new open source tool from Meta. DotSlash takes the pain out of distributing binaries and toolchains to developers. Inst … | Continue reading
We’ve partnered with Voltron Data and the Arrow community to align and converge Apache Arrow with Velox, Meta’s open source execution engine. Apache Arrow 15 includes three new format layouts developed through this partnership: StringView, ListView, and Run-End-Encoding (REE). Th … | Continue reading
By now you’re already aware that Python 3.12 has been released. But did you know that several of its new features were developed by Meta? Meta engineer Pascal Hartig (@passy) is joined on the Meta Tech Podcast by Itamar Oren and Carl Meyer, two software engineers at Meta, to disc … | Continue reading
While deploying Precision Time Protocol (PTP) at Meta, we’ve developed a simplified version of the protocol (Simple Precision Time Protocol – SPTP), that can offer the same level of clock synchronization as unicast PTPv2 more reliably and with fewer resources. In our own tests, S … | Continue reading
We’ve open sourced DotSlash, a tool that makes large executables available in source control with a negligible impact on repository size, thus avoiding I/O-heavy clone operations. With DotSlash, a set of platform-specific executables is replaced with a single script containing de … | Continue reading
Slow build times and inefficiencies in packaging and distributing execution files were costing our ML/AI engineers a significant amount of time while working on our training stack. By addressing these issues head-on, we were able to reduce this overhead by double-digit percentage … | Continue reading
At Meta, the quest for faster model training has yielded an exciting milestone: the adoption of Lazy Imports and the Python Cinder runtime. The outcome? Up to 40 percent time to first batch (TTFB) improvements, along with a 20 percent reduction in Jupyter kernel startup times. Th … | Continue reading
What’s going on with generative AI (GenAI) at Meta? And what does the future have in store? In this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Meta engineer Pascal Hartig (@passy) speaks with Devi Parikh, an AI research director at Meta. They cover a wide range of topics, including the hi … | Continue reading
On July 5, 2023, Meta launched Threads, the newest product in our family of apps, to an unprecedented success that saw it garner over 100 million sign ups in its first five days. A small, nimble team of engineers built Threads over the course of only five months of technical work … | Continue reading
HawkEye is the powerful toolkit used internally at Meta for monitoring, observability, and debuggability of the end-to-end machine learning (ML) workflow that powers ML-based products. HawkEye supports recommendation and ranking models across several products at Meta. Over the pa … | Continue reading
We are beginning to upgrade people’s personal conversations on Messenger to use end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default Meta is publishing two technical white papers on end-to-end encryption: Our Messenger end-to-end encryption whitepaper describes the core cryptographic protocol … | Continue reading
Python plays a big part at Meta. It powers Instagram’s backend and plays an important role in our configuration systems, as well as much of our AI work. Meta even made contributions to Python 3.12, the latest version of Python. On this episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Meta engin … | Continue reading
Meta is building for the future of AI at every level — from hardware like MTIA v1, Meta’s first-generation AI inference accelerator to publicly released models like Llama 2, Meta’s next-generation large language model, as well as new generative AI tools like Code Llama. Deliverin … | Continue reading
New optional features in WhatsApp have helped make calling on WhatsApp more secure. “Silence Unknown Callers” is a new setting on WhatsApp that not only quiets annoying calls but also blocks sophisticated cyber attacks. “Protect IP Address in Calls” is a new setting on WhatsApp t … | Continue reading
In about five short months, a small team of engineers at Meta took Threads, the new text-based conversations app, from from an idea to the most successful app launch of all time, pulling in over 100M users in its first five days. But this achievement wouldn’t have been possible w … | Continue reading
Meta’s Systematic Code and Asset Removal Framework (SCARF) has a subsystem for identifying and removing unused data types. SCARF scans production data systems to identify tables or assets that are unused and safely removes them. SCARF avoids tedious manual work and ensures that p … | Continue reading
Meta’s Systematic Code and Asset Removal Framework (SCARF) has a subsystem for identifying and removing dead code. SCARF combines static and dynamic analysis of programs to detect dead code from both a business and programming language perspective. SCARF automatically creates cha … | Continue reading
Meta has a very large monorepo, with many different programming languages. To optimize build and performance, we developed our own build system called Buck, which was first open-sourced in 2013. Buck2 is the recently open-sourced successor. In our internal tests at Meta, we obs … | Continue reading
Olivia Wu, Meta’s Technical Lead for Infra Silicon, discusses the design and development of Meta’s first-generation AI inference accelerator. [...] Read More... The post How Meta is creating custom silicon for AI appeared first on Engineering at Meta. | Continue reading
Systematic Code and Asset Removal Framework (SCARF) is Meta’s unused code and data deletion framework. SCARF guides engineers through deprecating a product safely and efficiently via an internal tool. SCARF combines this tooling with automation to reduce load on engineers. At Met … | Continue reading
Python 3.12 is out! It includes new features and performance improvements – some contributed by Meta – that we believe will benefit all Python users. We’re sharing details about these new features that we worked closely with the Python community to develop. This week’s release of … | Continue reading
Meta’s Native Assurance team regularly performs manual code reviews as part of our ongoing commitment to improve the security posture of Meta’s products. In 2021, we discovered a vulnerability in the Meta Quest 2’s Android-based OS that never made it to production but helped us … | Continue reading
Meta presents Chakra execution traces, an open graph-based representation of AI/ML workload execution, laying the foundation for benchmarking and network performance optimization. Chakra execution traces represent key operations, such as compute, memory, and communication, data a … | Continue reading
We’re introducing Arcadia, Meta’s unified system that simulates the compute, memory, and network performance of AI training clusters. Extracting maximum performance from an AI cluster and increasing overall efficiency warrants a multi-input system that accounts for various hardwa … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, a small team of engineers at Meta started working on an idea for a new app. It would have all the features people expect from a text-based conversations app, but with one very key, distinctive goal – being an app that would allow people to share their content a … | Continue reading
Ever wonder what it’s like to write code at Meta’s scale? On the latest episode of the Meta Tech Podcast, Meta engineer Pascal Hartig (@passy) sits down with Dustin Shahidehpour and Katherine Zak, two software engineers at Meta, about their careers and what it’s really like to s … | Continue reading
At Meta, Bento is our internal Jupyter Notebooks platform that is leveraged by many internal users. Notebooks are also being used widely for creating reports and workflows (for example, performing data ETL) that need to be repeated at certain intervals. Users with such notebooks … | Continue reading
Instagram has introduced Immortal Objects – PEP-683 – to Python. Now, objects can bypass reference count checks and live throughout the entire execution of the runtime, unlocking exciting avenues for true parallelism. At Meta, we use Python (Django) for our frontend server within … | Continue reading
Explore is one of the largest recommendation systems on Instagram. We leverage machine learning to make sure people are always seeing content that is the most interesting and relevant to them. Using more advanced machine learning models, like Two Towers neural networks, we’ve bee … | Continue reading
Meta is developing new privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to innovate and solve problems with less data. These technologies enable teams to build and launch privacy-enhanced products in a way that’s verifiable and safeguards user data. Using state-of-the-art cryptographic tech … | Continue reading
Fixit is dead! Long live Fixit 2 – the latest version of our open-source auto-fixing linter. Fixit 2 allows developers to efficiently build custom lint rules and perform auto-fixes for their codebases. Fixit 2 is available today on PyPI. Python is one of the most popular language … | Continue reading
Short-lived certificates (SLCs) are part of our latest efforts to further secure our Transport Layer Security (TLS) private keys on our edge networks. SLCs have a very short exposure compared to traditional certificates and lower the chances of a compromised private key being abu … | Continue reading
Meta has made it possible for people to upload high dynamic range (HDR) videos from their phone’s camera roll to Reels on Facebook and Instagram. To show standard dynamic range (SDR) UI elements and overlays legibly on top of HDR video, we render them at a brightness level compar … | Continue reading
Meta is transferring its IP for Evenstar, a program to accelerate the adoption of open RAN technologies, to the Open Compute Project (OCP). Meta will contribute Evenstar’s radio unit design to OCP, giving the telecom industry its first open, white box radio unit solution. The TIP … | Continue reading
Every day, thousands of developers at Meta are working in repositories with millions of files. Those developers need tools that help them at every stage of the workflow while working at extreme scale. In this article we’ll go through a few of the tools in the development process. … | Continue reading
When we first conceived of our aerial fiber deployment solution, Bombyx (the Latin name for a silk moth), we imagined a robot weaving strands of fiber-optic cables over powerlines, helping human workers quickly connect communities even in very rural or remote locations. Now, afte … | Continue reading
We’re rolling out MySQL Raft with the aim to eventually replace our current MySQL semisynchronous databases. The biggest win of MySQL Raft was simplification of the operation and making MySQL servers take care of promotions and membership. This gave the provable safety of Raft … | Continue reading
We’re sharing our latest threat research and technical analysis into persistent malware campaigns targeting businesses across the internet, including threat indicators to help raise our industry’s collective defenses across the internet. These malware families – including Ducktai … | Continue reading
What the research is: Millisampler is one of Meta’s latest characterization tools and allows us to observe, characterize, and debug network performance at high-granularity timescales efficiently. This lightweight network traffic characterization tool for continual monitoring ope … | Continue reading
WhatsApp has launched a new cryptographic security feature to automatically verify a secured connection based on key transparency. The feature requires no additional actions or steps from users and helps ensure that a conversation is secure. Key transparency solutions help stre … | Continue reading