Cover news reporter Liu Xuqiang
"When we re-examine the development of the current information system from the bottom of the hardware, we will find that the database is ushering in a huge change." Zhou Minghong said.
Zhou Minghong, who graduated from the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is a proper "scholar". In his work, he feels the conflict between the explosive growth of data and the backward performance of traditional CPU databases. And take this as an opportunity to set up the first DOMESTIC GPU database company with the team to independently start a business, and develop a domestic GPU database to fill the gap in related industries.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences "Xueba" independently started a business to develop a domestic GPU database
In the process of engaging in industrial product development, Zhou Minghong felt that compared with traditional CPU databases, GPU databases have the advantages of high cost performance, faster query speed, and good at handling high-order complex calculations. He plans to use GPU technology to revolutionize the underlying hardware of the domestic database. "If we compare the current way of calculation to an abacus, we are about to usher in the era of 'calculators'." Zhou Minghong depicted.
In May 2018, Zhou Minghong and Li Rubao, a disciple who also graduated from the Institute of Computer Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, left their original units to start their own businesses and knocked out the first line of code of GPU database products. After half a year of hard work, they came up with a simple prototype of the product, "through which you can already see the huge energy of the GPU in the database", Zhou Minghong recalled. Relying on this product prototype, the two successfully obtained tens of millions of seed round financing.
In February 2019, Zhou Minghong and zhou Minghong officially established Chengdu Quantum Elephant Cloud Computing Technology Co., Ltd., which was the only GPU database company in the country at that time and the first locally grown database company in Sichuan. Another year later, in May 2020, Quantum Image Cloud Computing completed the development of a stand-alone version of the core engine of the product. "After testing, the product performance has reached the top three in the world, and the cost performance ranks first in the world," Zhou Minghong said proudly.
This year, the company's products were upgraded from a stand-alone version to a distributed version, and achieved praise in the trial stage, "after testing, it can save users 50% of the cost and increase the utility by 30%", Zhou Minghong introduced.
Seek development to promote Chengdu's database technology to the world
For Zhou Minghong, the biggest difficulty lies in the construction of the entrepreneurial team.
In 2018, the state proposed 35 "card neck" technologies, and the database is one of them. Even now, databases are still the country's "card neck" technology. In this case, it is almost impossible for Zhou Minghong to recruit people who understand both the GPU database and the hardware underlying the GPU.
If you can't recruit ready-made, simply cultivate yourself. "We find developers who have a good foundation and are clear-minded and flexible, and then we take them with us to do it and cultivate it internally." At present, Zhou Minghong's team has 7 people, mainly graduates of the University of Electronic Science and Technology. After two years of work, Zhou Minghong believes that they can already stand alone. "In the future, when we carry out the next round of personnel expansion, each of them will become a seed and lead the development of small teams." Zhou Minghong introduced.
"From the first line of code, our GPU database is written by ourselves, so this is completely domestically controllable." Zhou Minghong believes that compared with the international leading database, there is still a certain gap between the domestic database. "We also need greater investment in research and development to have more room for development."
Zhou Minghong revealed that the company is seeking the next round of financing, and the progress is relatively smooth, which means that the company is about to usher in further development. In the future, the company intends to set up offices in China and the United States. In China, through cooperation with Internet companies to polish products, after the product is stable, it will achieve benefits in the government, military, and financial fields where the database computing demand is higher and the willingness to pay is stronger. Overseas offices are used to promote Chengdu's technology and Chinese products to the world.
"Hopefully, in the future, the company will become a leader in the post-Moore era of information." Zhou Minghong looked forward.
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