Perspective East Counting West | Detailed Explanation of the Application Scenario of "East Number West Calculation"

Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments recently jointly issued a document agreeing to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, yangtze river delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planning 10 national data center clusters. At this point, the national integrated big data center system has completed the overall layout design, and the "East Number West Calculation" project has been officially launched. How will "Counting East and Counting West" open a new chapter in the computing power network? The communication world focuses on this topic, invites industry experts to express their views, and we look at the "East Counting West" together.

In a way, Watt stands for the industrial economy and Bit stands for the digital economy. From the industrial economy to the digital economy, and then to the intelligent economy is an inevitable trend of social development, and the development of the digital economy is based on the industrial economy, and the digital economy will also upgrade the development mode of the industrial economy. There is also a game of resources between the two, and through the game, equilibrium optimization is continuously achieved. "Counting east and counting west" is a typical innovative result of the balanced development of continental watts and bits.

Bit's relationship with Watt

The development of bits is based on watts

The development of the digital economy will inevitably go through three major stages: digitalization, the Internet, and the digital twin. The digital economy with bits as productivity will not come out of thin air, but needs to be based on an industrial economy. Computing power is based on electronic industry technology, if there is no semiconductor, integrated circuit design, chip design and manufacturing and other technologies, the digital economy is a castle in the air, which can be seen from the mainland in recent years in the field of information and communication constraints.

Whether it is Internet of Things equipment, communication equipment, servers, or computers, mobile terminals, need to be based on electronic industry technology, although the mainland industry is complete, but large but not strong, if the digital economy to achieve rapid development, but also need to make up for the industrial economy era missed the global industrial chain division of labor shortcomings. The development of energy-saving technology in the field of data centers also depends on the progress of industrial technology, such as with the increase of server power consumption density, liquid cooling technology will be greatly popularized, and liquid cooling technology needs to continuously improve the coefficient of thermal expansion of silicone oil materials, which depends on the innovation and progress of industrial technology.

Watts' upgrades are based on bits

The industrial economy, with watts as its productive force, has also gone through three major stages of development: the steam engine stage, the power stage, and the analog circuit stage. The emergence and popularization of digital computers represent the advent of the digital economy, and digital technology brings accurate measurement, accurate calculation, and refined management, which is conducive to improving the extensive development of the traditional industrial economy. According to the data, by 2030, the carbon emissions reduced by various industries benefiting from ICT will reach 12.1 billion tons, of which more than 1.8 billion tons will be in the energy sector. The International Energy Agency predicts that the use of digital technologies could reduce the annual cost of electricity generation by $80 billion between 2016 and 2040, equivalent to 5% of the total cost of global electricity generation. Not only the power industry, industrial Internet, Internet of Things, industrial robots and other intelligent manufacturing technologies have played a decisive role in the upgrading of various categories of industry, and the industrial supply chain, capital chain, data chain, and production chain will eventually converge on the "brain" of industrial enterprises for automatic calculation and decision-making.

"Counting east and counting west" is an inevitable choice

Distribution characteristics of continental energy resources

90% of the mainland's coal resources are distributed in the qinling-Huaihe north area; 93% of the exploitable hydropower resources are distributed in the western and central and southern regions; solar energy resources are mainly distributed in the central and western regions along the 22-35 degrees north latitude; wind energy resources, Inner Mongolia and northern Gansu are the sub-large wind energy resource areas of the mainland, and the eastern coastal areas are rich in wind energy resources, but due to unstable wind speeds, there are not many resources that can be developed and utilized, which shows that the energy resources in the central and western regions of the mainland have great potential。

Judging from the distribution of natural cold sources, the average annual temperature is low in the southwest and northeast regions, and the southern part of the continent is rich in water resources and the northern region is scarce. The above characteristics determine the formation of "south-to-north water diversion" in the field of agricultural economy, the formation of "west-to-east gas transmission" and "west-to-east electricity transmission" in the field of industrial economy, and the formation of "east-to-west counting" in the field of digital economy.

Characteristics of continental hashrate demand

Entering 2022, the overall scale of China's computing power reached 170EFLOPS (1.7 trillion floating-point operations per second), the scale of continental data centers has reached 5 million standard racks, with the full and continuous penetration of digital technology into various fields of economy and society, the demand for computing power in the whole society is very urgent, it is expected to continue to grow rapidly at a rate of more than 55% per year, and the demand for computing power is strongly related to the development speed of the local digital economy. According to the DEEP index of the "China Digital Economy Development Research Report" compiled by The China Digital Economy Development Research Institute, the DEEP index of the first-tier provinces and cities in the development of the digital economy (such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanghai and Beijing, etc.) is above 180, and the five eastern provinces and cities of the first echelon rely on the basic advantages of the center to build the basics, respond quickly in the wave of digital economy development, and play a leading role in development.

According to the data released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology "China Computing Power Development Index White Paper", the economic benefits brought by each 1 yuan invested in China's computing resources are 3 to 4 yuan, and the investment in data centers brings higher economic externalities and profit spillover effects, but at present, some regions are forced by the energy consumption control pressure of "carbon peaking" and "carbon neutrality", and the data centers with data centers greater than 10,000 kWh are included in high energy consumption control to limit their development, although to some extent limit the development of the digital economy, but it is also a helpless move. The pressure to implement "carbon peaking" in the eastern region is much higher than in the western region.

The evolutionary stage of the "East Counting West" policy

● Construction of green data center stage

The annual electricity consumption of mainland data centers has accounted for 2% of the whole society's electricity consumption, and the huge proportion of energy consumption has prompted the competent authorities to realize the unified layout of data centers, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Guiding Opinions on the Layout of Data Center Construction" in early 2013, proposing the principle of "resource and environment priority" for data center construction and layout; from 2013 to 2015, the three major telecom operators and large Internet companies have joined forces in Guizhou, Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Ningxia and other large-scale data center industrial parks have been laid out, which currently undertake more than half of China's computing power projects.

"Eastern digital and western computing" is not sacrificing western resources to ensure the eastern economy, but through the optimization of the layout of data computing power energy consumption, the western region undertakes the eastern industry, and the eastern coastal economy drives the leapfrog development of the digital economy in the western region; the western region industry cultivates the local IT talent team and digital industrialization services when providing computing power services for the eastern region, and creates a new industrial form with the help of convenient computing facilities, optimizing the local employment structure and industrial structure.

●Construction of integrated big data center stage

In May 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Cyberspace Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the National Energy Administration jointly issued the Implementation Plan for the Computing Power Hub of the Collaborative Innovation System of the National Integrated Big Data Center (No. 709 [2021] of the National Integrated Big Data Center), proposing the layout and construction of a national hub node of the national integrated computing power network. In July 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)", which further refines the specific requirements such as the ladder layout of data center scale, energy-saving technologies and PUE standards, and industrial chain layout.

The full implementation stage of the "East Counting West" project

In mid-February 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments jointly replied to the letter, agreeing to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, yangtze river delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planning 10 national data center clusters, namely the "East Counting West" project. "East Counting West Computing" aims to guide the eastern computing power demand to the west in an orderly manner by building a new computing power network system integrating data centers, cloud computing and big data, optimize the layout of data center construction, and promote the coordinated linkage between the east and the west. Simply put, it is to make the computing power resources in the western region more fully support the computing of eastern data and better empower digital development.

"Counting the East and Counting the West" needs to solve the three major bottleneck problems

East-West transmission delay issues

The demand for computing power in the east not only includes the calculation itself, but also the feedback speed of the computing power, of which the business with low latency requirements can use the "East Number West Calculation" project, while the computing service with a delay requirement of less than 5ms is not suitable for using the "East Number West Calculation", especially for financial bulk transactions, large-scale online games, production line operations, etc. with high latency requirements, the basic computing power should be combined with the "end-side-cloud" to form a computing network that integrates edge computing, local cloud computing, and western basic computing power. With the upgrading and construction of the mainland's all-optical network and one-stem transmission network, these problems are expected to be solved.

Data center hashrate network technical issues

The current data center computing network is not a national computing network storage, network, computing three fusion design, a city once appeared "nucleic acid testing appointment server downtime incident", the reason is that the network firewall does not support large-scale access applications, resulting in a misjudgment for network attacks and denial of service. Therefore, in the future, the large-scale data center computing power network should also be designed based on the planning of the national computing power network, and the resources should be able to achieve flexible selection, control and forwarding separation, but the control surface is the bottleneck of the current data center network development, and the data center computing power network technology also needs to make key research and development breakthroughs.

Deterministic network issues

Low latency and low jitter are the characteristics of deterministic networks, while IP bearer networks are "best effort" route resolution and forwarding mechanisms, and the evolution of IP technology is divided into three stages: IP/ETH era, IP/MPLS era, and SRv6 era. SRv6 new network technology (SR refers to Segment Routing technology, v6 refers to native IPv6, SRv6 is IPv6 + Segment Routing) has a commercial basis, the future need to continue to solve the problem of packet bandwidth occupation, the proposal of deterministic network will promote the data center to the carrier-level service assurance level.

The application scenario of "counting the east and counting the west"

Storage and disaster recovery hash rate

Although storage and disaster recovery are not real-time computing services in the strict sense, they are also important business scenarios of "east counting and west counting". Data disaster backup refers to the process of copying the whole system or part of the data collection from the hard disk or array of the application host to other storage media to prevent data loss caused by operational errors or system failures. According to the classification of the external environment for the damage of data center equipment, it can be divided into IT system problems, network security technology problems, information security management problems, disaster event problems, the first three are artificial destruction, the last is caused by force majeure, for the eastern region, the previous three are the mainstay.

Data disaster recovery can be divided into three levels according to the level: data level (data synchronization), application level (application takeover), and business level (non-IT factors). For the eastern region, the data level accounts for the largest proportion, the overall scale of the disaster preparedness market in the mainland '14th Five-Year Plan' period is about 150 billion yuan, and the total amount of data is growing at an average rate of about 30% per year, of which more than 50% of the data that needs to be provided for disaster recovery is more than 50%. Remote disaster preparedness provides a better guarantee for data recovery in the eastern region. Hospital medical images and diagnostic records, electronic library archives, personnel files, monitoring data of important places, etc. need to be preserved for a long time and can be included in the scope of "Western Calculation" scenarios.

Base hash rate

The basic computing power accounts for about 70% of the scale of computing power, based on the rapid development of the mobile Internet in the mainland, the applications of online shopping, mobile video, mobile payment and other applications have shown explosive growth, and the proportion of computing power applications in the Internet industry has reached about 47.1%; the wide deployment of smart cities, digital government, government cloud, and video surveillance has made the government computing power account for 13.9%; in the future, background production scenarios such as image rendering and video rendering, as well as offline analysis scenarios such as big data mining and digital twin simulation simulation, will be very extensive. The hash rate requirements will also be higher.

The replacement cycle of the server is generally 5 to 6 years, the cost of building a private cloud is higher, if the use of public cloud services can greatly reduce operating costs, and cloud service providers put data computing services in the western computer room can greatly reduce the cost of cloud services, the two superimposed will bring greater economies of scale.

Intelligent computing power

Intelligent computing power requires the server to have a large throughput of data, with the in-depth promotion of smart cities, the artificial intelligence processing of camera video channels includes providing millions of video access, cloud intelligent computing capabilities, and edge intelligent computing capabilities. Intelligent computing power requires computing chips such as GPUs to support machine vision algorithms, while for intelligent computing power such as the Internet of Vehicles, unmanned driving, and intelligent networked cars, it is necessary to provide edge computing services with a latency of less than 1ms, edge computing is not suitable for "East counting and West computing", and image computing services that are not real-time can be used. In addition, other data inference, reinforcement learning training, etc. can also be placed in the western data center for computing.

Supersumean computing power

As we all know, the construction of new infrastructure in the mainland includes three major directions: information infrastructure, information fusion infrastructure and innovation infrastructure, the current innovation infrastructure is very different from the past, the amount of data that needs to be processed is very large, it must be based on supercomputing power, such as in the field of meteorological analysis and prediction, supercomputing can greatly improve the spatial resolution and broadcast frequency of the grid. Other application scenarios include high-altitude cosmic ray observation, aerodynamics, vehicle crash test simulation experiments, drug experiment data analysis, and the supercomputing center is like a large computing power sharing laboratory.

In short, while building a digital economy, the mainland is also consolidating the three bases of the intelligent economy - data, computing power, and algorithms. The construction of the computing power basic network needs to be integrated with the industrial economy, and it also needs to rely on the resource layout and technological innovation of the industrial economy in terms of energy supply, server energy saving, and integrated circuits; the upgrading of the computing power infrastructure will further promote the development of industrial science and technology, and "East Number West Calculation" is a typical innovation case of the integration of the two.

End

Author: Tang Huaikun, Zhongtong Service Consulting Design & Research Institute Co., Ltd

Editor-in-Charge/Layout: Fan Fan

Review: Shen Qing

Producer: Liu Qicheng

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