(Economic Observation) The "Landing Tide" of Intelligent Computing Centers in China
China News Service, Beijing, September 12 (Reporter Liu Yuying) China is accelerating the construction of a new generation of artificial intelligence computing infrastructure. With policy support and demand, the "landing wave" of intelligent computing centers has been rapidly set off in various places.
The "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Computing Infrastructure Development Research Report" released by the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center on the 11th believes that at this stage, artificial intelligence has become the focus of competition among countries around the world.
As an important underlying infrastructure form for the development of the artificial intelligence industry, the intelligent computing center has been pushed to a new height of development.
The so-called intelligent computing center refers to the artificial intelligence computing center.
The new generation of artificial intelligence computing power infrastructure is a public computing power infrastructure that is represented by the intelligent computing center and is oriented to artificial intelligence scenarios to provide required computing power services, data services, and algorithm services.
Huang Peng, deputy chief engineer of the National Industrial Information Security Development Research Center, said in an interview with the media that China's artificial intelligence computing power infrastructure-the intelligent computing center is accelerating construction, but still lags behind the demand for applications.
China's demand for artificial intelligence computing power is growing rapidly.
All walks of life in China are using artificial intelligence to empower the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, generating a lot of demand; the development of emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, blockchain, and quantum computing also requires the support of computing power infrastructure; The field of government governance, especially after the outbreak of the new crown epidemic, needs the support of computing infrastructure.
In 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission of China clarified the scope of "new infrastructure" for the first time, and included the intelligent computing center as a typical representative of computing power infrastructure into the category of information infrastructure.
In 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission also proposed to implement a major national integrated big data center construction project to build a new computing power network system.
Huang Peng said that the intelligent computing center has the characteristics of high investment, high risk and high monopoly, and the current thinking at home and abroad is the construction of government-enterprise cooperation.
For example, the Hengqin Advanced Intelligent Computing Center project is a joint venture between the Hengqin New District Management Committee and the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The Yangtze River Delta Artificial Intelligence Supercomputing Center built by Tencent in Shanghai’s Songjiang District will introduce leading upstream and downstream companies in cloud computing, network security, and video and image algorithms. Large-scale artificial intelligence model production capacity.
These are self-constructed by enterprises.
Behind the accelerating pace of the construction of the intelligent computing center, it faces the problem of inconsistent construction of the top-level system and the standard system.
The report pointed out that, specifically, the market’s concept of computing power is confused, leading to misalignment of construction direction and construction demand; second, industry pricing standards are chaotic, and the price standards for artificial intelligence computing power infrastructure construction are not unified. The price of the project varies greatly.
Moreover, in terms of construction ideas, most computing centers have adopted the strategy of giving priority to computing power performance development and then stimulating application development, ignoring the migration and compatibility of upper-level applications, resulting in low initial application efficiency of the computing power system and unable to fully support comprehensive Requirements for intelligent application scenarios.
In addition, the core technologies of software and hardware are subject to foreign restrictions, repeated construction, and high energy consumption, which are also in urgent need of breakthrough.
Huang Peng believes that the development of intelligent computing centers should avoid the old road of repeated construction of data centers.
Local governments should make scientific predictions to understand the needs of local artificial intelligence at different stages, and the development of intelligent computing centers should be closely integrated with local actual applications and scenarios.
Huang Peng emphasized that the intelligent calculation center should uphold the principle of "openness and tolerance".
The new generation of artificial intelligence computing power infrastructure will need to support more than 80% of mainstream artificial intelligence application software in the future, and support mainstream AI frameworks, algorithm models, data processing technologies, and a wide range of industry applications.
The public intelligent computing center can provide the society with a steady stream of inclusive and abundant intelligent computing power, which is the best way to realize the intelligentization of society.
Huang Peng suggested that the standardization of construction specifications and the reasonableness of pricing of the intelligent calculation center will directly or indirectly affect its overall ability to serve the society and the cost of use, and should be included in the scope of supervision and regulation.
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