Text/Haifeng looks at technology
In February this year, the mainland officially implemented the state-level super project - East Counting West Calculation, which has attracted much attention in today's digital age. Some people say that it is a milestone that will open the era of China's computing power, trigger trillion-level industrial investment, and will also re-plan the new industrial map of China's economy.
What is hash rate? What does the opening of the computing power era mean for China? In the April 2 CCTV "Dialogue" program, Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Liu Guiqing, deputy general manager of China Telecom Group Co., Ltd., Liu Shaowei, president of Huawei's data communication product line research and development, and Ning Yu, an industry observer, discussed the above issues. After the chase, "Haifeng Looking At Technology" summarized the following dry goods:
What is "counting the east and counting the west"?
Yu Xiaohui, Academy of Information and Communications Technology: The so-called Eastern And Western Calculation, in layman's terms, is to take the data from the East to the West for calculation, and the data refers to the digitized information that can be stored and processed in a binary manner, and the calculation process represents a series of computing resources.
The data center has relatively high resources and environmental constraints, which are not suitable for all of them to be established in the east, and the west has the basic elements of computing computing power resources, such as low population density and resource enrichment. Therefore, putting a part of the data in the west for processing and analysis is a nationwide overall resource allocation optimization project.
China's computing power map demand looks at the east, and resources look at the west
Yu Xiaohui, Academy of Information and Communications Technology: Judging from China's computing power map, the east is much higher than the western region, with the east accounting for 60% and the western region accounting for 20%. From the perspective of the spatial distribution potential of computing power resources, the potential of the western region is much higher than that of the eastern region.
For real-time computing power with high requirements, such as industrial Internet, finance, games, etc. need to be calculated in the east, and for non-real-time computing power, such as offline analysis, data backup, etc. in the west, the industry usually determines it by 50 milliseconds.
Is computing power the "oil" of the digital economy era?
Yu Xiaohui, Academy of Information and Communications Technology: A country's computing power and economy show a positive correlation, according to the analysis, in the world's top 20 countries, 17 countries are also in the TOP20.
How strong is China's hash rate?
Yu Xiaohui, Academy of Information and Communications Technology: In recent years, the global emphasis on computing power resources has reached an unprecedented level. China ranks second, accounting for 31% of the world's computing power resources. At present, the continental computing power reaches 135EFlops (floating-point operations per second), which is equivalent to 1 billion notebooks jointly calculated.
Computing power + chemical reaction of thousands of industries
Huawei Liu Shaowei: Taking the combination of computing power and pharmaceuticals as an example, it used to take several years to complete, but through super computing power, 100 drugs can be matched in 2 weeks, of which 30% are effective, and on this basis, secondary screening is carried out.
Liu Guiqing of China Telecom: The advent of the era of computing power has promoted the metacosm to move the virtual to reality, and the metacosm has also enhanced the demand space for computing power. As a basic telecom operator, China Telecom is building a digital base in the era of computing power.
On this basis, the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain and the ecological partnership relationship will also change. In the past, Huawei provided equipment to China Telecom as a supplier, and now Huawei has become a computing power provider. Through cooperation, the two sides have become a cooperative relationship of mutual penetration and joint cross-border cooperation.
The era of computing power is reconstructing the industrial ecology
Huawei Liu Shaowei: After the completion of the East And West Computing, the ultimate goal of the computing power network is to connect countless users with "one computer in the whole country". According to Huawei's observation of bank customers, for every thousandth of data lost, throughput will drop by 50%, which requires a lossless network. In the face of future challenges, Huawei's focus is on investing in computing power networks, including computing power, networks, and cloud services.
How much GDP can be boosted by a dollar of computing power investment?
Yu Xiaohui of the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology: According to the calculation of the Institute of Information and Communications Technology, for every yuan invested in computing power, the direct and indirect economic return of computing power is 3-4 yuan. 1:1 is direct output and 1:3 is indirect output. Direct economic output refers to server computing equipment, storage equipment, IT network equipment, etc. Indirect output refers to the productivity returns and efficiency gains brought about by the investment of computing power resources into the economic sectors.
China Telecom Liu Guiqing: Digital industrialization is a direct pull, and industrial digitalization is an indirect pull. Industrial digitalization refers to industrial transformation and upgrading and traditional industrial digital upgrading, and digital industrialization refers to the promoters of digital devices and digital networks. In recent years, China Telecom's industrial digitalization has reached a 20% growth.
New industrial opportunities in the era of computing power
Huawei Liu Shaowei: Judging from the growth of Huawei's sales solutions in recent years, the data center network and cloud business has grown rapidly.
Observer Ning Yu: The small-scale customization generated by the personalized needs of enterprises will bring growth points to small and medium-sized enterprises.
China Telecom Liu Guiqing: In the era of computing power, large enterprises rely on scale benefits to achieve benefits, because of the overall layout of central computing power, regional computing power to marginal computing power, small and medium-sized enterprises do not need to build equipment, operation and maintenance, so the income of small and medium-sized enterprises will be more obvious.
Yu Xiaohui of the Chinese Academy of Information and Communications Technology: Whether the mainland's industrial transformation and upgrading can be successful depends on whether small and medium-sized enterprises can catch the express train of the "digital wave." Small and medium-sized enterprises because of the technical and capital dilemma, in the past wave of informatization is relatively lagging behind, in the future development, if through the cloud to provide them with lightweight systems and services, tens of millions of small and medium-sized enterprises are expected to succeed in transformation.
Computing power empowers manufacturing opportunities and challenges
Observer Ning Yu: If the manufacturing industry replaces the existing factory with the level of digitalization, there will be a high cost, a large cost, and a long cycle of gain and loss, which is also the fundamental reason why the manufacturing industry is unwilling to do digital transformation, and the reason is that the manufacturing industry cannot standardize and process production like the Internet industry.
Yu Xiaohui, Academy of Information and Communications Technology: Unlike the Internet, which deals with digital objects, manufacturing processes physical objects. The key problem with the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry is that the computing power resources must be combined with each manufacturing industry to produce chemical reactions and digital revolutions, which is a relatively long process.
China Telecom Liu Guiqing: On the one hand, the requirements of the manufacturing industry for high reliability and low latency have been met with the advent of the 5G era. On the other hand, the scale effect of east and west will make the cost of manufacturing industry somewhat reduced.
Huawei Liu Shaowei: The automotive industry has a high degree of digitalization, taking the automotive function experiment as an example, the original 1.8 million pieces of data took several weeks to calculate, and under the blessing of artificial intelligence and computing power resources, it only takes one day. In addition, the reason for the low proportion of digitalization in the manufacturing industry is that the wired connection of the factory is "seven countries and eight systems", resulting in "data can not come up, and the computing power cannot go down".
How has the age of computing power changed our lives?
Observer Ning Yu: Taking the digital twin scenario as an example, through the mapping of virtual mirrors, high-end experts in Beijing can simultaneously repair complex equipment with engineers in Gansu. Digital twins make people far away, through computing power scheduling and application scenario processing, making immersive operations possible.
Huawei Liu Shaowei: The arrival of artificial intelligence computing power makes the entire network become a native architecture of artificial intelligence, and facing the future, the network will automatically adjust and distribute according to the business requirements it carries.
Liu Guiqing of China Telecom: The advent of the era of computing power will profoundly change the production and way of life of the economy and society, and personally, we can truly enjoy life and enter the world of the meta-universe.
Yu Xiaohui, Academy of Information and Communications Technology: In the next 10-20 years, it is foreseeable that there will be profound digital changes in every field of economy and society, and all business processes and systems will be digitized.
In this dialogue, the author feels that whether it is technical logic, industrial ecology or social changes, it is so fresh, but also heartwarming. It is expected that through the joint efforts of the industry, we will embrace the beautiful future of omnipotent network, omnipresent computing power and all-encompassing intelligence as soon as possible.