The "East Number and West Calculation" project has been fully launched (Sankei Observation)
Data source: National Development and Reform Commission, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology
In February of this year, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Cyberspace Administration of China, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a notice agreeing to conduct business operations in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, and Gansu. , Ningxia and other 8 places have started the construction of national computing power hub nodes, and 10 national data center clusters have been planned.
The overall layout design of my country's integrated big data center system has been completed, and the "East Number and West Calculation" project has been officially launched.
As another important national strategic project following the "West-East Gas Transmission", "West-East Electricity Transmission" and "South-to-North Water Diversion", what is the far-reaching significance of "Counting the East and the West"?
How is the current new computing power network system constructed?
The reporter interviewed relevant enterprises and experts.
Help my country's data center supply and demand balance, achieve low-carbon, green and sustainable development
20 kilometers south of Hohhot, in the Big Data Cloud Computing Information Park in Qingcheng, 10,000 IDC (Internet Data Center) racks running 24 hours a day make the quiet grassland surging with computing power.
This one of the largest cloud computing data center bases in China, China Unicom Hohhot Cloud Data Center, is an important part of China Unicom's eight computing power hub node resource layout, and it is also the focus of comprehensively undertaking the national "East Digital and Western Computing" project. project.
At present, more than 100 government and enterprise customers such as national ministries, government agencies, world-renowned cloud computing manufacturers, large Internet manufacturers, and banking and insurance institutions have settled in.
"The annual average temperature in Hohhot is 8 degrees Celsius, and natural cold sources are used for cooling about 5 months a year." The relevant person in charge of China Unicom Hohhot Cloud Data Center introduced that through the innovative use of "cooling tower + plate heat exchanger" for cooling, It can save 5 million kWh of electricity every year.
"With the rapid development of new technologies such as 5G, my country's data resource storage, computing and application requirements continue to increase, driving the rapid growth of data center scale." He Baohong, director of the Institute of Cloud Computing and Big Data, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, introduced that in the past five years, my country's The average annual growth rate of data center racks exceeds 30%, and the annual power consumption of a very large data center usually reaches the level of 100 million kilowatt-hours.
According to the research data of the Open Data Center Committee, the total energy consumption of China's data centers in 2020 will be 93.9 billion kWh, and the carbon emission will be 64.64 million tons.
Total energy consumption is expected to reach about 380 billion kWh by 2030.
If green energy is not used, the total carbon emissions will exceed 200 million tons, accounting for about 2% of the country's total carbon emissions.
Promote the "Eastern Digital and Western Computing" project. By building a new computing power network system integrating data centers, cloud computing, and big data, the eastern computing power demand will be guided to the west in an orderly manner, which can give full play to the climate, energy, and environment of the western region. The expansion of renewable energy supply and nearby consumption will not only help alleviate the shortage of energy supply in the eastern region, but also help my country's data centers achieve low-carbon, green, and sustainable development.
"Using the resources in the western region to meet the demand in the eastern region can gradually improve the imbalance between supply and demand of data centers in my country, and help to cultivate my country's super-large-scale data element market." He Baohong pointed out that the "Eastern Numbers and West Calculations" project will help improve my country's major regions. It can improve the network capacity between data centers and between data centers, thereby improving the level of national network interconnection.
"Promoting the 'East Number and West Calculation' project is an important project to solve the problem of unbalanced and insufficient development in my country." Li Hongwu, President of China Unicom Research Institute, said that "East Number and West Calculation" is not only conducive to promoting the balance and fullness of regions and industries Development is also conducive to enhancing the overall anti-risk capability of the industrial chain.
Just like the "West-East Electricity Transmission" and "West-East Gas Transmission" to solve the energy problem, the "East Number and West Calculation" can not only bring investment to the west through the construction of new infrastructure, help the local industrial structure adjustment and economic transformation, but also through the calculation Power infrastructure construction will drive the drainage and development of upper-level applications, and drive the coordinated development of the national digital economy.
Drive investment of about 400 billion yuan every year, providing a broad market for industrial chain enterprises
"On the day of the launch, 12 companies signed contracts to settle in, and the utilization rate of computing power reached more than 90%, realizing saturated operation immediately after the launch." The largest artificial intelligence computing center, Chengdu Intelligent Computing Center, was officially launched.
According to the relevant person in charge of Chengdu Intelligent Computing Center, this computing center with a total investment of about 10.9 billion yuan includes three major platforms: artificial intelligence computing power platform, urban intelligent brain platform and scientific research innovation platform.
Among them, the first-phase project of the artificial intelligence computing power platform adopts the artificial intelligence cluster based on the basic software and hardware of Huawei Ascend artificial intelligence, and the computing power is equivalent to the computing power of 150,000 high-performance personal computers.
"Huawei is providing competitive products and solutions to customers who participate in 'East Digital and Western Calculation' through ICT (information and communication technology) connectivity and continuous innovation in computing technology and digital energy," said Guo Ping, chairman of Huawei's board of supervisors.
It is understood that more than 20 cities are currently planning and building artificial intelligence computing centers, which provides a series of industry solutions such as "Ascension Intelligent Manufacturing", "Ascension Intelligent Travel" and "Ascension Intelligent Tour" jointly released by Huawei and its partners. Provides a broad market.
"The 'East Numbers and West Calculations' project has a large spatial span, data transmission is more frequent, users have higher requirements for low latency, and the performance of the existing backbone network is difficult to handle." Deputy General Manager of the Materials Division of YOFC Optical Fiber and Cable Co., Ltd. Wang Tiejun said that "East and West" will effectively promote the upgrade of the backbone network transmission rate from 100G to 200G, 400G and other higher rates, which will bring new market opportunities to YOFC.
According to reports, in 2021, the new products developed by YOFC will help China Mobile achieve 1,100 km long-distance single-carrier 800G high-capacity transmission.
This year, YOFC has won the bid for China Telecom and China Mobile's new-generation optical fiber and cable centralized procurement projects with the largest share.
There are also major server manufacturers who are also interested in the market potential of the "East and West" engineering market.
Since the first phase of the high-performance computing center project of Zijin Cloud Data Center in Jinchang, Gansu Province was completed and put into operation, it has reached cooperation intentions with Shanghai and Wuxi Supercomputing Centers on the implementation of the "East Digital and Western Computing" project.
"Zijin Cloud has adopted Lenovo's high-performance computing solutions, and installed 100 Lenovo high-density rack-mounted computing nodes, 50 Lenovo AI servers and distributed storage systems." Huang Yue, general manager of the political and educational industry of Lenovo's infrastructure solutions business group It is said that the "East Number and West Calculation" project has brought significant benefits to the data center industry, and the prosperity of the server industry will continue to rise.
According to estimates, China's server market revenue growth rate will exceed 10% in 2022.
At present, domestic servers have rapidly grown into the main force in my country's computing power, and domestic server manufacturers such as Lenovo and Inspur are among the top five in my country's server market, with an overall market share of 74%.
Huang Yue said that this share will further increase under the drive of the "East and West" project.
According to Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, as of 2021, the total number of data center racks in use in my country will be 5.2 million, the Internet data center market revenue will reach 150 billion yuan, and the cloud computing market will be 303 billion yuan.
It is expected that during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the average annual growth rate of data center racks will remain at around 20%, and the revenue growth rate will remain at 25% to 30%; the average annual growth rate of cloud computing revenue is expected to exceed 30%.
Xu Bin, deputy director of the Innovation-Driven Development Center of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that the "East and West" project can drive investment of about 400 billion yuan every year; at the same time, after the construction of computing power facilities, it will also bring information technology, green energy and other industries to the west. Chance.
Consolidate computing power and network infrastructure construction, and establish a new mechanism for data cross-domain storage and management
On March 31, the construction of the China Telecom Hangzhou Big Data Center project, a core data node in the Yangtze River Delta region with a total investment of 5 billion yuan, officially started construction in Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou, Zhejiang.
On May 29, the Shaoguan cluster, the national hub node of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a national integrated computing network, officially started construction.
By 2025, the Shaoguan data center cluster will be built with 500,000 standard racks and 5 million servers, with an investment of over 50 billion yuan.
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As the main force of my country's data center construction, in recent years, the three major basic telecom operators, third-party Internet data center operators and Internet companies have accelerated the construction of computing power networks.
At present, among the approximately 5.2 million standard racks in my country's data centers, the west accounts for 20%.
With the advancement of the "East Digital and Western Computing" project, will data producers and computing power users located in the downstream of the industrial chain choose to store and calculate data in the west?
"The total cost of a data center includes investment and construction costs and operating costs." said Ding Hongqing, deputy general manager of China Mobile's Planning and Construction Department. Among them, operating costs such as utilities, operation and maintenance costs, and management costs account for about 20% of the total cost, while electricity costs It accounts for more than 50% of operating costs.
"The western region can not only achieve natural cold source cooling, save electricity consumption, but also have certain advantages in electricity prices compared with the eastern region." Ding Hongqing said.
However, limited by the gaps in network capabilities, technical capabilities, talent systems, market environment and application scenarios, the western region still faces many difficulties in the development of big data.
Ding Hongqing suggested that we should actively explore the establishment of a new mechanism for cross-domain data storage and management, build an efficient and flexible resource scheduling system, improve the experience of using the "Eastern Data and Western Computing" project, and simultaneously study the value-added services of data operations and industry cultivation mechanisms, and introduce relevant support policies. Effectively help the central and western regions to improve technical capabilities, talent reserves and service levels by relying on data center construction.
"Data storage and computing require a large investment and a long return time. If the western region only relies on financial subsidies for electricity and land transfer fees to attract data centers, it will be difficult to last." Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, suggested that the western region should start from the whole The industrial chain to improve the ecology of the data center, and strive to expand to the upstream and downstream industries of big data.
For example, the data preprocessing industry can be developed upstream, including data labeling, cleaning and desensitization, and local data mining services.
To develop downstream, introduce the hardware part of the big data industry chain, such as the production of hardware facilities such as server edge computer rooms, as well as the establishment of engineering and operation and maintenance teams, and the provision of engineering services for the construction of data center computer rooms.
In addition to looking for expansion opportunities in the upstream and downstream of the big data industry chain, the "East and West" project can also make a fuss about the differentiation of data.
According to reports, due to different requirements for timeliness, data can be divided into "cold data" and "hot data".
"Cold data" generally means that the timeliness requirements are not too high, and the data processing is mostly background processing, offline analysis, storage and backup and other business types, accounting for about 70% of the total data, which is suitable for the west.
"Hot data" requires high processing time and needs to make decisions and calculations immediately, such as autonomous driving, telemedicine, industrial Internet, financial securities, disaster warning, video calls, artificial intelligence reasoning, etc. With high requirements and high transmission costs, it is more suitable for processing in the east or even around the enterprise.
"From the construction of data centers to the cross-domain circulation of data elements, the implementation of the 'East and West Calculation' project is a systematic subject. In addition to the need to continue to consolidate technical strengths such as infrastructure, network, and computing power, it is also necessary to pass more complete and scientific methods. Policies and mechanisms to achieve." He Baohong said.
It is understood that first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are continuing to strengthen policy guidance for the data center industry, requiring the gradual closure of backup storage data centers with high energy consumption and backward functions to promote low-carbon development of data centers.
"Gradually dispel the concerns of enterprise data moving westward. In addition to playing a guiding role in policies in areas where resources are scarce in the east, such as land supply, electricity prices, and emission reduction targets, we must also work hard to solve the problem of technological integration." Li Hong Wu said that in response to the technical problems such as bandwidth, delay, computing network integration, and computing power scheduling currently faced by the "East Digital and Western Computing" project, it is necessary to further strengthen the top-level design, form a unified standard system, and create ultra-long-distance, large-bandwidth, The intelligent optical transmission network should also be based on the coordination of the computing network, and build a national integrated computing power network through computing power scheduling to promote the effective allocation of computing power resources in my country.