Digital China is surging, and the computing power economy is moving forward. It has been a year and a half since the "East Data and West Calculation" was proposed. The reporter of the Securities Times recently went to some representative computing power hub nodes to explore the camp, and some new variables are also emerging in the steady progress of "East Data and West Computing".
On the whole, the new computing power infrastructure has blossomed at many points, and the situation of excessive concentration in the east has been greatly improved, which has promoted the continuous optimization of the computing power structure. At the same time, the AI boom has spawned the "evolution" of data centers to intelligent computing centers. In the process of "counting from east to west", challenges from technology, scheduling, operation, security and other aspects have also emerged.
"Count" and "Number" questions
Lanzhou Yuzhong, from the ancient Silk Road divided into three ways. After autumn, the colorful terraces are embedded in the mountains, layered and illuminated.
Last year, a northwest 5G big data industrial park featuring green and low-carbon was laid in Yuzhong Ecological Innovation City; At the end of August this year, the main body of the first phase of the Internet data center project was successfully capped, and it was ready to be completed and put into operation in March next year. At that time, you will see rows of servers in the industrial park rattling slightly, and densely packed hard drives constantly flashing green shimmering.
The main body of the project is Dr. Peng of Shanghai Main Board, which is the company's first computing power project in northwest China, which is used to support the stable supply of government-level and enterprise-level cloud services and digital solutions in Lanzhou, Gansu and surrounding areas.
In February 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments jointly issued a document agreeing to launch the construction of national computing power hub nodes in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Yangtze River Delta, and Gansu is also among them. The industry regards this as a sign of the beginning of the era of mainland "computing power economy", and resources and capital investment in many places have increased significantly.
Sinnet launched a RMB2 billion investment announcement last year to build the second phase of the Tianjin Baodi Cloud Computing Base, which plans to build four standard cloud computing center buildings, two power buildings, a 110KV substation and related supporting facilities to expand the data center resource reserve in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
"East Data and West Calculation" has driven the A-share computing power industry chain company to usher in a highlight moment. In the first half of this year, Tianfu Communications, Ruiming Technology, Dahua and other subdivided companies all caught the computing power productivity express, and the net profit of many companies doubled.
At the same time, the rise of these projects also ensures that data "over the mountain" to more economical sinking areas for calculation. According to data, the scale of new data centers in computing power hubs in western countries now exceeds 600,000 standard racks, accounting for 45% of the country's new data centers.
A-share companies are also riding the tide. The Science and Technology Innovation Board provides basic cloud computing services for enterprises. A few days ago, the company said that since the construction of the data center was delivered for commercial use, some customers have migrated some of their business from the east to the western region to reduce the overall cost of computing power of the enterprise.
In this regard, Gu Shaohui (pseudonym) of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology analyzed that the project in the western region has abundant wind and solar energy, and the climate is dry and cold, which can make the energy consumption of big data centers at the lowest level in the country and provide low-cost computing power services. At a time when computing power is penetrating into life like water and electricity, economy and environmental protection coexist.
However, the reporter learned in the camp that "East Data and West Arithmetic" has an overall layout, and not all "West Arithmetic" can support "East Count", but has a differentiated division of labor. Gu Shaohui introduced that the Western Data Center is designed to serve services that do not require high transmission delay but have a large amount of data computing and storage. Much of the real-time business in the east is still handled by neighboring data centers.
Under the national strategy of "counting from east to west", Zhangjiakou has become an important hub node of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei computing power hub. Liu Haifeng, deputy director of the Bureau of Industry and Information Technology of Zhangjiakou City, Hebei Province, recently made it clear that Zhangjiakou City will continue to consolidate the advantages of data center clusters, and plans to put into operation 4 million servers in the city by 2025, the total number of cabinets will reach 700,000, and the computing power scale will reach 15,000P, and a regional computing power dispatching center serving Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei will be built.
evolve
The "East Data and West Calculation" hoof is moving steadily, but participating enterprises often face new variables in the landing process.
Xu Jiajin, vice president of Dr. Peng Group, told reporters, "The preliminary planning of our Lanzhou project was originally a traditional IDC. However, in the first half of this year, the big model and AIGC were on the rise, and the intelligent computing business developed rapidly, so it was adjusted. The company used 30% of its resources as liquid-cooled cabinets, and the servers were also replaced with intelligent computing servers. This reflects the advantages of private capital. ”
Data centers mainly store data and provide Internet services, and dispatch data with high throughput and as soon as possible to meet data access requirements. The intelligent computing center emphasizes the training and reasoning of artificial intelligence, although there are also data access needs, but the requirements are more complex and the architecture is different. Together with supercomputing and urban brains, the two constitute the four categories of the mainland computing power industry.
Dr. Peng is not alone in the temporary change. In July this year, Runjian changed the purpose of the raised funds, and 200 million yuan was used to build the intelligent computing power center project of Runjian Co., Ltd. and upgrade the computing power service capacity; At the same time, Weixing Intelligent signed an investment cooperation agreement for the project of Guian Intelligent Computing Center, and the market gave incremental intelligent computing project expectations.
Intelligent computing centers are becoming a new direction for the priority development of computing power. According to the reporter's statistics, at least 30 cities are currently building or proposing to build intelligent computing centers, and multi-city intelligent computing centers have been put into operation to provide local computing power support.
In the "100-model war", Beijing is the most representative city. Of the more than 100 large models that have been announced, Beijing accounts for more than half. Computing power has also become an important support base. The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Economy and Information Technology has repeatedly stated that it will accelerate the construction of a new generation of artificial intelligence public computing power centers and enhance the ability to supply high-quality data.
Gu Shaohui said that whether it is IDC, the Internet, or international giants, they are indeed stepping up the layout of intelligent computing, and the proportion of intelligent computing in the four computing power bases will increase. However, he also believes that multiple places will form a diversified supply system of computing power.
"Some regions will combine the two types of computing power infrastructure and provide services through different partitions; For example, Wuhan, Xi'an, Chengdu and other places have built supercomputing centers and intelligent computing centers at the same time. In order to reduce costs and improve efficiency, there may be four types of infrastructure placed in a computing power center at the same time in the future. Gu Shaohui thought.
Chain master
In Xu Jiajin's view, Dr. Peng's Northwest 5G Big Data Industrial Park has opened up a unique "Lanzhou model". First, the full-stack type of computing power center + computing power trading platform + computing power network; Second, integrated computing, network, and cloud services and operations; Third, it resonates at the same frequency with the digital construction of local governments. This makes Dr. Peng have the meaning of "chain master" in the computing power industry chain.
The person in charge of the Lanzhou economic and information department told the Securities Times reporter that there are now more than 10 industrial chains in the city, and many of them have chain master enterprises. We intend to take Dr. Peng as the leading chain master to strengthen the construction, extension and complementary chain of the industrial chain. "Because the digital industry cannot be an island, we must do ecology, and we also hope to take Dr. Peng's Northwest 5G Big Data Industrial Park as an opportunity to strengthen the development of the computing power ecological industry led by Dr. Peng."
In the past two years, Gansu Province has implemented the "East Data West Calculation", built a national data center cluster, and driven the information technology service industry to grow by more than 8%, becoming a representative of the economic rise of the central and western regions. Hu Angang, dean of the Institute of National Conditions of Tsinghua University, also believes that similar to the previous traditional infrastructure such as transportation to promote the economic development of the western region, the new infrastructure of the east and west is also expected to narrow the development gap between the east and west and achieve mutual benefit and win-win results.
Not only to keep the computing power in the local area and sell it to the whole country through East Data and West Computing, but also to gather the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain to create a digital industry cluster - this has become an important idea in the process of promoting "East Data and West Computing" in many places.
Statistics show that during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, when the intelligent computing center achieves 80% application level, the city's investment in the intelligent computing center can drive the growth of artificial intelligence core industries by about 2.9-3.4 times and related industries by about 36-42 times.
"The construction of intelligent computing centers is indeed closely related to the economy." When dismantling the logic behind Gu Shaohui, Gu Shaohui said that by building an intelligent computing center, it can attract investment and open up all links of production, education and research, and then promote the development of related industries.
challenge
While alleviating the imbalance in the supply of data computing power in the east and west, some challenges have also emerged.
The person in charge of the cloud business of a large factory in the northern region told reporters that the computing power of a single computing center in the mainland is still insufficient. "In many cases, only by investing in parallel computing and collaborative computing can multiple computing centers catch up with the world's advanced level. At the same time, leapfrog and efficient scheduling of computing power and networks is also a major challenge. ”
Shen Changxiang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, agrees with this view. At a forum held recently, he believed that computing power empowers the digital transformation process. "AI training tasks bring about an increase in computing power, and the computing power required doubles every 3-5 months, which has exceeded Moore's Law of doubling in 18 months. The prerequisite for the development of artificial intelligence is that computing power must be safe and trustworthy. This is equivalent to the body having immunity to ensure health. ”
Qi Xiangdong, chairman of Qianxin Group, believes that there are considerable security risks in the long-distance data transmission, remote data storage, and computing resource allocation involved in the "East Data and West Computing". "We urgently need to establish an integrated network security protection system, and build a multi-level comprehensive defense system without dead ends from multiple levels such as account management, data leakage prevention, data dynamic perception, and database auditing."
In addition to computing power, operations and security, there are also industry insiders who point the challenge to scheduling. "Infrastructure construction has achieved great results, but I think that the practice of computing power scheduling still lags behind infrastructure construction." Gu Shaohui believes that to promote the implementation of the "East Data and West Computing" strategy, we must not only solve the problem of efficient interconnection of computing power in the east and west, but also make efforts in how to coordinate computing power, transportation capacity and storage capacity, and optimize resource scheduling.