Xinhua Finance Nanjing, May 14 (Reporter Zhu Cheng) With the advent of the digital economy era, computing power has become an important foundation for the development of the national economy and a new focus of scientific and technological competition. Recently, Peng Zhen, chairman of Inspur Information, said in an interview with reporters that the development of computing power not only comes from chips, but also from system innovation, and Inspur Information will be "application-oriented, system-oriented", focusing on stimulating innovation vitality, expanding innovation paths, accelerating innovation landing, and promoting artificial intelligence to become a productive force in all walks of life.
Computing power comes from the chip, but also from the system
Computing power is the ability of computer hardware and software to work together to perform a certain computing requirement. With the rapid development of information technology such as artificial intelligence, the importance of computing power as a basic support is becoming more and more obvious.
Over the years, Inspur Information has been deeply engaged in various innovative products and solutions such as cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, and edge computing, and has become the world's leading provider of IT infrastructure products, solutions and services.
"Computing power is an integral part of artificial intelligence, and we should stand at the height of the artificial intelligence industry and look at the development of computing infrastructure from the perspective of the system." Peng Zhen said that algorithms, computing power, data and other elements should be developed in a coordinated manner, and not only one aspect and one link such as chips.
Taking the Transformer architecture (a neural network model based on the self-attention mechanism) born in 2017 as an example, in just a few years, the chip performance is only 8 times higher according to Moore's Law, but through system innovation, the performance of AI computing is improved by more than 1,000 times. "System innovation involves all aspects, and as the system becomes more complex, it is more necessary to integrate corresponding sensing and scheduling software, including business perception, automatic resource scheduling, and elastic expansion." Peng Zhen said.
It is reported that in recent years, Inspur Information has carried out a series of explorations for system innovation. In 2023, Inspur Information released the converged architecture 3.0, breaking the traditional chip-centered stand-alone system design idea, and changing to a new architecture with Wanka (referring to GPU) cluster as the design starting point and system as the core, and realizing the optimal ratio of CPU and GPU through intelligent scheduling, so as to achieve high computing power operation.
According to the 2023 annual report of Inspur Information, in 2023, the company will release a new generation of G7 computing platform, covering 46 new products for cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other application scenarios, and has created a number of performance records once it is listed. In the first quarter of 2024, Inspur Information showed a rapid growth trend, achieving operating income of 17.607 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 85.32%.
Adhere to independent research and development and promote open innovation
In recent years, the international artificial intelligence large model technology represented by ChatGPT and Sora has developed rapidly and has formed a leading trend. According to incomplete statistics, as of January 2024, there are 243 AI large models in China, of which 39 are general-purpose models.
Peng Zhen believes that the current multi-modality is a normal situation in the early stage of industrial development. "In the early stage of industrial development, there are many enterprises in innovation, with the development of the industry, will gradually converge, in this process, 'will do everything yourself' is not the best option, but should unswervingly promote the independent research and development of key core technologies in the industrial chain at the same time, promote high-level open innovation."
It is reported that in recent years, Inspur Information has actively integrated into the global trend of hardware openness and software open source technology. In 2023, Inspur Information, together with ESI, Baidu, State Grid, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, etc., established OCTC, the world's fourth largest open computing community, and jointly released 4 group standards for AI-oriented heterogeneous collaborative computing systems, as well as general specifications for AI whole cabinet servers and technical specifications for cold plate liquid cooling. In 2023, Inspur Information will also fully open source its own 100 billion parameter large model source 2.0, and open data download to support the development of more than 50 large models in the industry.
"We need to see the gap between us and the international advanced, but we must also give full play to the development advantages of the mainland's AI industry, solve the problem of insufficient performance of single-point chips from the system level such as algorithm accuracy, computing architecture, and interconnection, and meet the needs of cutting-edge applications such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and big data in the future." Peng Zhen said.
It is worth noting that at present, there are more than a dozen major CPU companies in the mainland, and more than 20 companies in the field of accelerated computing such as GPU/FPGA (programmable array logic). In order to promote collaborative innovation between different manufacturers, Inspur Information has developed and released a large model development platform EPAI, which supports a variety of large model development frameworks, unifies multi-chip access specifications, integrates more than 10 models, and supports more than 20 types of computing chips, which allows users to unbind a single architecture and select the most suitable model and computing power according to application requirements.
"In the field of complex high-tech products, it is difficult for a country or an enterprise to have the latest technology of the whole chain, and it will be a more effective choice to let different software and hardware market players exert their own innovation vitality through open innovation." Peng Zhen said.
Adhere to the application of the pilot to drive the algorithm computing power upgrade
In recent years, Inspur Information has accelerated its national layout, especially in Jiangsu, which has not only realized the in-depth layout of many industries such as medical care, teaching and scientific research, and enterprises, but also fully covered its business in 13 cities in Jiangsu, and provided support for thousands of projects.
Peng Zhen said that Inspur Information is deeply involved in the Jiangsu market, which is closely related to the solid local industrial development foundation, the increasing demand for intelligent transformation and digital transformation, and rich application scenarios. "The biggest opportunity for the development of computing power lies in AI applications, and we should adhere to the main position of enterprise innovation, encourage application innovation, improve the standardization and scale of cloud applications, and form a benign interaction through both technology and application."
GCL Group is a leading enterprise in the field of new energy in China, and seizing the company's needs to accelerate the transformation and upgrading to intelligence and open up a new track in the energy computing industry, Inspur Information has cooperated with the company to build a digital energy intelligent computing center, and adopted the industry-leading Inspur artificial intelligence computing unit to help GCL carry out digital business in industries such as smart energy, smart transportation, intelligent manufacturing, digital trade and industrial Internet.
Inspur Information also participated in the construction of Nanjing Intelligent Computing Center to build a foundation for the development of the digital economy. At present, Nanjing Intelligent Computing Center has provided services for nearly 100 scientific research institutes, universities and innovative enterprises such as the University of Science and Technology of China and Nanjing University, helping the research and development of new technologies such as digital human, autonomous driving, and bioinformatics.
It is reported that for the Jiangsu market, Inspur Information is committed to developing AI development tools, empowering partners, and striving to achieve a compound growth rate of 33% in revenue from 2024 to 2025.
Editor: Luo Hao
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