Zhi DongXi (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Yang Chang
Edit | Desert Shadow
The metaverse has been hot from 2021 to 2022, and its important supporting technology artificial intelligence has continued to move forward, in addition to empowering the metacosm, it has also helped many industries to achieve intelligent upgrading.
Whether it is a metaverse or other intelligent scenarios, it needs powerful and diversified computing power to achieve, corresponding to the infrastructure, that is, it needs a variety of matching servers to provide support.
The corresponding server customization needs are increasing, and all players on this track have their own development ideas.
Among them, the server company Ningchang was established only 2 years ago, has achieved a number of breakthroughs, according to the IDC report, Ningchang has ranked second in the first half of 2021 China's accelerated computing market sales, accounting for 14%, accumulatively won more than 50 times the international authoritative AI benchmark MLPerf world first score. What are the characteristics of the fast-growing Ningchang in research and development? What kind of planning has been carried out in terms of strategic layout? What will be the future direction of Ningchang's development?
In response to these problems, Qin Xiaoning, president of Ningchang, Wei Bingqing, vice president of Ningchang, and Zhao Lei, chief technology officer of Ningchang, conducted in-depth exchanges with Zhidong and other media to share Ningchang's development practices.
First, the curtain of the meta-universe has been opened, AI has landed into the deep-water period, and the demand for computing power has become increasingly diverse
Qin Xiaoning said that since the second half of last year, all walks of life have frequently discussed the metacosm, in fact, for Ning Chang, the word metacosm can be reduced to "computing power demand".
Although there is no recognized answer to what the metaverse is, there is no need to doubt that the metacosm is an intelligent world in which virtual and reality are integrated, and artificial intelligence (AI) can help the link between virtual and reality, which is an important technology to realize the metacosm; in the future, AI will continue to iterate and update in the metaverse, and the realization of these requires various types of computing power to provide support.
Metacosmity is one of the trends in the future, and looking back, Qin Xiaoning said that the realization of various AI scenarios at present requires high-performance computing power, and in more detailed fields, different AI scenarios, such as automatic driving, voice interaction, etc., require different computing power.
As a new generation of AI technology is accelerating the deep integration and application of various industries, the use scenarios are very changeable and highly dependent on scene customization, which means that AI companies must customize the corresponding computing power for different scenarios, and the corresponding demand for customized servers has increased sharply. According to IDC market research, the purchase share of customized products in the global server market has reached more than 30%.
▲Ning Chang President Qin Xiaoning
Second, the customized project increased to 1.7 times year-on-year, and Ning Chang insisted on technical reserves and development-oriented research and development
From the perspective of server companies, server types are diverse, choose the first main product, and then provide corresponding customized services is particularly critical, Qin Xiaoning said, at the beginning of Ning Chang's establishment, they judged that the future market demand in addition to the need for universal computing servers, heterogeneous computing, AI computing is the ai field of server demand will have explosive growth, so Ning Chang priority GPU server such as service AI application server as the company's main product to develop.
She said that the feedback from the market confirmed Ning Chang's original judgment, according to IDC's "China Semi-Annual Accelerated Computing Market (First Half of 2021) Tracking" report, Ningchang has ranked second in China's GPU server market sales and China's accelerated computing market share. In 2021, Ningchang undertook more than 530 customized server projects, 1.7 times that of 2020.
▲The market ranking of Ningchang Server in IDC data
In addition to observing and paying attention to market trends, Ning Chang has its own layout and thinking in product and research and development, especially in server customization.
In view of the increasing number of AI applications and the diversification of computing power demand brought about by the brewing of meta-universe applications, at the beginning of 2021, Ning Chang released the "Zhiding +" strategy, with the four major routes of "smart research and development", "quality and energy manufacturing", "enjoy services" and "value to the future" to achieve customized paths, and has continued to promote the landing of the "Zhiding +" strategy.
Qin Xiaoning said that server customization requires a high technical threshold, and it is quite difficult to implement various data center projects in a customized manner.
Ningchang has a full-stack customized research and development capability, which is supported by Ningchang's three major technology platforms and more than 20 core technologies. Ningchang's full-stack custom R&D capabilities combined with Ningchang's agile development system, Ningchang realized the real server product on demand customization, combined with Ningchang's quality and energy manufacturing mode, Ningchang realized rapid product iteration, and then achieved a rapid response to market demand.
All these are inseparable from the technical reserve work that Ning Chang has always insisted on.
On the one hand, Ning Chang will pay attention to various trends related to the industry, and carry out some technical reserves in advance, for example, with the increasingly large global computing power consumption and the resulting environmental protection problems, from national policies to industry fields, "carbon peak" and "carbon neutrality" have become important development goals, and energy conservation and emission reduction have become a topic that must be faced.
Qin Xiaoning mentioned that in order to better help users respond to the call for carbon neutrality, Ningchang will release a new immersion phase change liquid cooling server in 2022 to further help the PUE (power efficiency) goals of various data centers.
Ningchang currently has a variety of different cooling technology capabilities such as traditional air cooling, cold plate liquid cooling, closed liquid cooling and so on, among which cold plate liquid cooling has covered the entire server product platform of Ningchang, with the "closed liquid cooling cooling" system, so that users do not need to transform the computer room, only relying on circulating cold plate and EVAC heat dissipation, you can achieve a 40% increase in server cooling capacity, reduce energy consumption by 3%, and then achieve effective energy saving.
On the other hand, Ningchang's research and development has always been very open, forming a technical team with users, that is, working with users to overcome certain technical difficulties or discussing the necessity of investing technical resources.
Looking forward to the future development of Ningchang, Qin Xiaoning mentioned that the key word for Ningchang's development in 2022 is "energy", which will release the kinetic energy of Ningchang's forward-looking layout, help users solve the most urgent efficiency problems at present, and empower more users and more industries.
Conclusion: The server track continues to heat up, customization or breaking the game is the key
As a new player in the server track, Ning Chang has completed many breakthroughs in 2 years, using "Zhiding +" to meet customer needs, achieving a 5-fold increase in sales, and the server market in China has rushed into the top few.
From the perspective of the changes in the scale of Ningchang's business, many companies do have the need for customization, and this demand is increasing, combined with the industry trend, customization or the key to breaking the game in the server industry.