Wise Things (public number: zhidxcom)
Author | Yang Chang
Editor | Li Shuiqing
Wise Things February 25th news. "East counts west counts" national project was officially launched, bringing important good signals for the data center industry. ("History Moments! East counts west counts" national project was launched"
As a "pearl" in the field of data centers, the Smart Computing Center has also attracted attention from the industry.
It is generally believed that the full name of the Smart Computing Center is Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, which is mainly for artificial intelligence (AI) applications to provide the required computing services, data services and algorithmic services, and consists of AI chips and computing units and other equipment, which is different from the cloud computing centers and supercomputing centers. Enterprises and research institutions can rely on the powerful arithmetic provided by the Smart Computing Center to drive AI models for data deep processing and achieve AI application innovation.
The "East Counts, West Counts" national project emphasizes the construction of a computing network between eight hubs in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and Chengdu-Chongqing to support the growing demand for computing power across the country. Along this arithmetic network "map", we found that the smart computing center has "blossomed".
In detail, from 2021 to the beginning of 2022, no less than 20 cities across the country have built or are building IQ centers, the number of IQ centers reached 27, of which 12 are located in the eight hubs, close to 50%.
"East counts west counts" project national computing power hub nodes within the scope of the smart computing center
So what specific cities are building or planning to build a smart computing center? What kind of impact will the "East Counts West Counts" project have on the smart computing center? What is the progress of the construction of the ICC project? How will it affect the local AI industry?
Smart things through the survey since 2021 around the planning, construction and completion of the smart computing center, and with industry insiders, to discuss these issues with you.
According to Smart Stuff, from January 1, 2021 to February 15, 2022, there are at least 26 cities in the country*** that are promoting or have just completed the construction of their local smart computing centers, and these cities include provincial capitals such as Nanjing and Xi'an, as well as non-provincial capitals like Xuchang and Qingdao.
Many of these cities have already built local information infrastructures such as big data centers, cloud computing centers, and national supercomputing centers. However, these centers are not a substitute for the Smart Computing Center, and there are differences in their functions - like the Cloud Computing Center, which mainly provides cloud services, the Supercomputing Center, which mainly provides supercomputing services for scientific research, and the Smart Computing Center, which mainly provides pervasive AI arithmetic services for enterprises and research institutes.
In addition, CITIC's White Paper on the Development of AI Computing Centers (2021) points out that the Smart Computing Center draws on the technical architecture of supercomputing (high-performance computing) centers and cloud computing data centers for massively parallel computing and data processing, but it is based on AI-specific chips as the computational arithmetic base. The software and business architecture of the above three types of centers are not the same, but cloud data centers and supercomputing centers can also be built by extension to provide intelligent arithmetic to the outside world.
According to our statistics, in 2021, there will be eight smart computing centers built and put into operation or trial operation across the country, namely, Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, Hefei Advanced Computing Center, Nanjing Intelligent Computing Center, China Telecom Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Big Data Intelligent Computing Center, Zhejiang (Yangtze River Delta) New Generation Full-Featured Intelligent Supercomputing Center, Xi'an Future Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, Central Plains Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, and Harbin Advanced Computing Center for Artificial Intelligence, which were put into operation in May, June, July, August, September, September, October, and December, respectively. Most of these smart computing centers have Phase II construction plans.
As of today, the ICCs that will be operational in 2021 and 2022
Some of the ICCs are not directly named "ICC" or "AI Computing Center", but rather "Advanced Computing Center" or "AI Computing Center". Instead, they are named "Advanced Computing Center" or "Intelligent Supercomputing Center", but they also provide intelligent computing power, so they can be counted as smart computing centers, such as the Hefei Advanced Computing Center and the new generation of full-featured intelligent supercomputing center in Zhejiang (Yangtze River Delta).
The arithmetic test benchmarks used to measure arithmetic power vary from center to center, using slightly different arithmetic units, but whether it's "1 P OpS", "1 PFLOPS FP16", "1 Petaflops", or "1 P", it all equates to a thousand trillion operations per second.
Since the start of 2022, there has been one new smart computing center put into operation in China, the Shangtang Technology Artificial Intelligence Computing Center in Shanghai.
Many cities are in the process of building Smart Computing Centers, and from January 1, 2021 to February 15, 2022, there are at least 18 cities in the country*** that have signed contracts, started, tendered for, and planned to build Smart Computing Center projects, of which at least six cities have already announced the start of construction, namely Hefei, Qingyang, Dalian, Shenyang, Shenzhen, and Changsha.
As of now, the smart computing centers planned or already started construction around 2021 and 2022
Comparing the construction of smart computing centers around 2021, there are a few less smart computing center projects before 2020. However, some of the smart computing centers that will start construction in 2021 have actually set up projects for bidding and pre-study planning in 2020, such as the Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center project.
IQC is not a new type of data center only in 2021, China's earlier built IQC also has Shenzhen Pengcheng Cloud Brain, Kuangshi Wuhu AI supercomputing center, etc. In 2018, Pengcheng Cloud Brain I was initially completed and on-line operation, with an arithmetic power of 100 PFLOPS (1 PFLOPS is equivalent to one thousand trillion times per second computing power).
From the point of view of the geographic distribution of the national IQC, at present, there are provinces and cities in the east, center and west that are deploying IQCs. As a kind of data center, the construction plan of ICCs in different places will inevitably be affected by the policy of "east counts, west counts".
In particular, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments in the "national integration of big data center collaborative innovation system computing hub implementation plan" and other documents, pointed out that: "In principle, for the new data center outside the national hub node, the local government shall not be given preferential policies on land, finance and taxation." The IQC, as a project led by local governments, will most likely be affected, but it will not necessarily migrate to the western region in large numbers. Because the IQC is mainly oriented to AI-related industries, these businesses also have higher requirements for network communications, and in this regard, the eastern region has a slight advantage.
Ren Jing暘, senior vice president of Dawning, told Wisdom that the "East Counts, West Counts" project will promote the development of smart computing centers, and it is expected that in the construction of the national hub node of the national integrated computing network, the planned data center projects will be configured with a certain scale of smart computing power, and some projects may be directly in the form of smart computing centers.
In addition, the planned data center projects will be equipped with a certain scale of intelligent computing power, and some projects may also be directly in the form of intelligent computing center.
In addition, from the point of view of the scale of computing power announced by these smart computing centers, 100P computing power is the starting goal of many smart computing centers.
It is generally believed that 100P is equivalent to the computing power of 50,000 high-performance computers. For example, if astronomers want to locate a characteristic star in a star map of 200,000 celestial objects, and if they don't have enough computing power, it may take more than 100 days, but if they have 100P computing power, the time required to locate the star is only 100 seconds.
Ren JingRise said that the 100P mentioned by ICC in general refers to FP16 or INT16, or half-precision arithmetic, and that at this stage, starting with 100P can achieve a relatively large scale benefit.
From the demand point of view, ICC, as a city-level public **** arithmetic platform, to meet the arithmetic needs of various types of users in the region such as government, enterprises, universities, etc., the starting scale should not be too small, otherwise it can not support large arithmetic needs such as training of similar large models, and is not enough to play the scale of the benefits of intensive **** enjoyment.
Ren JingRise added that, from an investment perspective, the development of smart computing centers is still in its early stages, and the investment in construction, operation, application and ecological construction is large, so it is necessary to make a reasonable assessment of the local financial capacity, and make a moderate overdeployment according to the actual needs.
Most ICCs are built in phases, with one phase completed, one phase in operation, and two or three phases built at a later stage according to operational conditions and industrial development needs.
For example, Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, which completed the construction work of the first phase of the project in May 2021 and began to provide AI arithmetic power for enterprises, but was soon saturated. So, the Wuhan AI computing center has carried out the second phase of the project expansion work, expanding the scale of the arithmetic power from 100P to 200P. the relevant person in charge of the Wuhan AI computing center said in an interview with the media that the second phase of the arithmetic power is now also close to saturation, along with the preparation of further arithmetic power expansion work.
Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center
According to the data of the intelligent computing center, at least hundreds of enterprises have signed up for the intelligent computing center, for example, Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center has already provided arithmetic power for a number of colleges and universities and scientific research institutes, and more than 100 enterprises, and Nanjing Intelligent Computing Center has already attracted more than 40 industry, academia, and research institutes to move in.
An intelligent computing center can support many industrial scenarios at the same time, such as automatic driving, intelligent medical, intelligent city, intelligent transportation, intelligent mining, intelligent manufacturing, etc., mainly depending on the local needs, generally to support the local advantage of the industry to better development. For example, Qingdao is close to the sea, its artificial intelligence computing center bidding documents have mentioned Qingdao artificial intelligence computing center to support Qingdao's advantageous industrial clusters, such as smart home, smart manufacturing and other industrial intelligence continued to lead, and emphasize support for the development of the local wisdom of the ocean economy.
All of the above smart computing centers are not limited to supporting a single industry. However, there are some cities that have chosen to build more targeted ICCs, like Jincheng, Shanxi, which has built an ICC (Intelligent Mine Innovation Laboratory Innovation Achievements & Computing Center) specifically for the coal industry. The intelligent computing center by Huawei, Jinneng Holdings and other enterprises to participate in the construction, mainly to promote the intelligent construction of Shanxi coal mine.
Intelligent Mine Innovation Laboratory Innovation Achievements & Computing Center
In the construction of the Smart Computing Center, AI and ICT companies behind municipal and architectural design companies are important players, such as Dawning, Huawei, Wave, Tencent, and Shangtang Technology.
In the process of exploring the ICC, Dawning, as the head player in the computing field, put forward the "5A-level" ICC construction program, and carried out the practice and exploration related to the ICC in five aspects: openness, integration, greenness, universality, and service. At present, Dawning's 5A-level ICC has been completed in Zhuhai, Guangdong, Hefei, Anhui, Tongxiang, Zhejiang, etc., and its ICC in Kunshan, Jiangsu, etc. has also entered the construction stage.
Hefei Advanced Computing Center
Dawning's Smart Computing Center will adopt a multifaceted collaborative approach compatible with multiple chips, algorithms, models, etc. to realize the provision of multifaceted computing power. For example, the Hefei Advanced Computing Center, which Dawning participated in the construction of, can not only provide intelligent computing power, but also the computing power required for high-performance computing. In terms of reducing the energy consumption of smart computing centers and data centers, Dawning has developed submerged phase-change liquid cooling technology, which can reduce the PUE value of smart computing centers to 1.04 to 1.05.
Huawei is supposed to be an early adopter of smart computing centers, and one of the companies that have participated in the construction of smart computing centers around the world the most. Xu Yingtong, president of Huawei's ascendancy computing business, once revealed during the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference that Huawei hopes to start the construction of more than 20 smart computing centers within 2021.
Several Huawei-built computing center projects, including Pengcheng Cloud Brain II and Wuhan Artificial Intelligence Computing Center, almost all use Huawei's Atlas 900 AI cluster architecture to achieve AI computing power supply. The Atlas 900 AI cluster architecture is composed of thousands of Ascend 910 AI processors, and its total computing power reaches 256P 1024 PFLOPS FP16.
Pengcheng Cloud Brain
Wave has also had years of research on the Smart Computing Center, and has the appropriate technology and hardware to support the production of computing power, aggregation, scheduling, and release of computing power in the Smart Computing Center's operation process. Wave has many years of experience in computing centers, including production, aggregation, scheduling, and release of computing power during the operation of computing centers.
Nanjing Intelligent Computing Center
As an important player in the data center industry, Tencent applies its exploration of data centers to the construction of intelligent computing centers, like the Tencent Intelligent Industry Yangtze River Delta (Hefei) Intelligent Computing Center, which uses Tencent's fourth-generation T-Block and other high-end modular technologies, to support the rapid delivery of projects. Tencent's fourth-generation T-Block and other high-end modular technology is the modularization of IT, air conditioning and other data center functions to achieve on-demand flexible configuration.
Shangtang Technology is from 2018 to start the artificial intelligence computing center pre-research work, in July 2020 to start the construction work of Shangtang Technology Artificial Intelligence Computing Center. on January 24, 2022, Shangtang Technology Artificial Intelligence Computing Center started operations.
Shangtang Technology Artificial Intelligence Computing Center
We found that more and more cities have begun the construction of Smart Computing Centers by investigating the Smart Computing Centers constructed and completed since 2021. This reflects the importance of the AI industry in various places. Judging from the construction period of some existing ICCs, the approximate time for a general phase of construction ranges from half a year to a year, and more ICCs under construction may be completed and put into operation this year. In addition, the "East Counts West Counts" project will also have multiple impacts on the planning and construction of new ICCs.
Currently, the number of companies involved in the construction of ICCs is relatively limited, and with the increased demand for ICCs in various regions and the addition of some new players, players in the field of ICCs are likely to face more intense competition.