Computing power: the core productive force of socio-economic development

Computing power has become a core productive force, and at both the macro and micro levels, it has had a positive impact on economic development

The word "computing power" is a hot technical term in the scientific and technological circles in recent years, it originates from computer and computing technology, brings together "number" and "calculation", but more emphasis is placed on "force", emphasizing the important value and role of computing power in promoting scientific and technological progress and social development.

As a witness to China's computing industry, for more than 30 years, I have participated in and witnessed the leapfrog development of China's computing industry, and I have also seen that computing power plays an increasingly important role in the economy and life. At present, human beings have reached the inflection point of the intelligent era: AI technology supported by huge computing power is gradually maturing, unmanned farms, intelligent agricultural machinery, smart agriculture, etc. are changing the agricultural production methods that have lasted for thousands of years, smart factories have significantly improved production efficiency, and contactless delivery and drone delivery have become new highlights of smart logistics... A revolution brought about by computing power will greatly change the production and lifestyle of human beings in the future, and computing power has become the core productive force of social and economic development.

Computing power has fundamentally transformed and upgraded the three elements of productivity, and ultimately driven the transformation and upgrading of human society. The intelligent scenarios we talked about such as smart agriculture, smart factories, and unmanned distribution are all the power of computing behind them, which transforms workers from traditional people into "people + AI", and "workers" can transcend biological limits and show exponential growth. As the object of processing of calculation, data becomes a new object of labor, a new means of production, from tangible to intangible, endless, and the more it is used, the more it is used. Production tools have also been upgraded from traditional machinery to computing-driven information equipment, labor efficiency is also exponential growth, and productivity has been liberated as never before.

Computing power has become a core productive force, and at both the macro and micro levels, it has had a positive impact on economic development. We have observed that the GDP of each country or region shows a clear positive linear correlation with the number of servers, and server shipments can already be used as an important indicator to measure the level of computing power development.

From a global perspective, China and the United States, which have the largest global economic aggregate and show strong economic vitality, are also the two countries with the largest server shipments in the world, far exceeding the sum of other countries, and the contribution of the digital economy is significantly higher than that of other countries. The situation is similar in China's provinces and cities, where the number of server shipments per 100 billion yuan of GDP in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Zhejiang is much greater than that of other provinces and cities. According to the "2020 Global Computing Power Index Assessment Report" released by the International Data Corporation, computing power is closely related to economic growth, and the computing power index will increase by an average of 1 point, and the digital economy and GDP will grow by 3.3 ‰ and 1.8 ‰ respectively.

Therefore, we can say that computing power is an important indicator of the level of economic and social development. At the level of entity enterprises, 10 years ago, most of the world's highest market capitalization companies were energy companies and financial companies, and the top MARKET value of IT (information technology) companies was only Microsoft. In recent years, almost all of the world's most valuable companies have been information technology and services companies, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook in the United States, alibaba and Tencent in China. It's also interesting to note that these top-ranked companies are also the ones that procure the most servers in the world, and it's the massive amount of computing power that creates tremendous value for these companies.

"The Age of Computing Power", by Wang Xiaoyun et al., published by CITIC Publishing Group

Entering the era of wisdom, the trend of diversified development of computing power has become more and more obvious

The importance of computing power is self-evident, which is also consistent with the explosive growth of social demand for computing power that we have observed. Since the rise of deep learning in 2011, it has become the hottest and most mainstream AI algorithm, and the demand for computing power for training deep neural network models has increased exponentially. OpenAI, an AI nonprofit, released a report in 2018, pointing out that since 2012, the computing power used in AI training tasks has doubled every 3.43 months, and by 2018, the demand for AI computing power has increased by 300,000 times. In 2020, the computing power required to train the natural language understanding giant model GPT-3 (the third generation of universal pre-trained language mode) reached 3640PDa, requiring 10,000 GPU acceleration components to complete together. At this rate, the computing power requirements of the big model are expected to reach one million PDa by 2023, even if it is calculated using the world's fastest supercomputer, it will take two years. The supply of computing power is far from catching up with the growth rate of the demand for computing power.

In the face of the "gap" in the supply of computing power, computing technology and industry need to build a new development pattern, which can be described simply as: to accelerate the transformation from computing to intelligent computing through the integration of multiple computing power and the infrastructure construction of computing power supply. We can see that in the era of wisdom, the trend of diversified development of computing power has become more and more obvious, which is mainly reflected in the complex diversification of computing scenarios and computing architectures. Multiple architectures raise the issue of application incompatibility and low execution efficiency. We need to break the traditional architecture design, innovate the intelligent computing architecture, and achieve efficient aggregation of computing power and on-demand definition. These technologies are all involved in the fifth article of the "Age of Computing Power", "Breaking through the Limit - The Future of Computing Power", which unfolds a grand blueprint for the future of computing power for the reader.

The integration of multiple computing power will greatly improve the efficiency of computing power production, and the computing power will truly serve all walks of life in the social economy, so that it will enter thousands of households, relying on the innovation of the computing power supply model. Computing power will be supplied by a unified social infrastructure like electricity, heat, and water. In 2020, the state clearly proposed that the scope of new infrastructure construction includes computing infrastructure represented by data centers and intelligent computing centers, and the infrastructure construction of computing power supply has become a trend. It is foreseeable that in the context of accelerating the construction of new infrastructure, the intelligent computing center will become the main production center and supply center of computing power in the future. Therefore, as described in the fourth part of the book, we must accelerate the infrastructure construction of computing power supply and accelerate the landing of high-quality, energy-efficient intelligent computing centers. In this landing process, we must do a good job in the integrated development planning of network, energy, computing power, data, application, etc., and finally build a new computing power network pattern.

The pace of progress in human society will not stop, and social progress will rely more and more on scientific and technological innovation. It is hoped that more Chinese original technologies will appear in global scientific and technological innovation, and China's scientific and technological workers will take more firm and confident steps in computing technology innovation, and in the new journey of competition and cooperation in the development of computing power, they will not fail to live up to the expectations of the country and make more contributions to the development of human society.

This book selects the small and precise key events in each historical period of the development of human "computing power", uses easy-to-understand language, and tells a big history of the development of global computing technology in an easy-to-understand language, which is very interesting. At the same time, this book can be used as a reference book to popularize the knowledge of computing power to the public, which is of great benefit to both guidance work and knowledge development. I believe that both public IT practitioners and professional readers can feel the charm of dancing with computing power from the book.

(The author is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering)