◎Our reporter Liu Yuanyuan
Recently, 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, Gansu, and Ningxia. Eight other places have started the construction of national computing power hub nodes, and 10 national data center clusters have been planned.
So far, the overall layout design of the national integrated big data center system has been completed, and the "East and West" project has been officially launched.
Why implement the "East and West" project?
How to build?
The responsible comrades of the relevant departments and experts in the data center field have interpreted and analyzed this.
Computing power, the new focus of global strategic competition
"As the core productivity of the digital economy, computing power has become the new focus of global strategic competition." The responsible comrade of the High Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission said when answering a reporter's question on the situation of "East and West".
The responsible comrade said that up to now, the scale of my country's data center has reached 5 million standard racks, and the computing power has reached 130EFLOPS (1300 billion floating-point operations per second).
With the continuous penetration of digital technology into all areas of the economy and society, the demand for computing power in the whole society is still very urgent, and it is expected to continue to grow rapidly at a rate of more than 20% every year.
"ICT research shows that the current annual increase in investment in China's data centers is around 180-200 billion yuan," said Lv Tianwen, secretary-general of the Data Center Energy Conservation Technical Committee of China Electronics Energy Conservation Technology Association, in an interview with a reporter from Science and Technology Daily.
Undoubtedly, computing power has become an important infrastructure for the development of the national economy.
At the same time, it should be noted that the implementation of the "East and West" project is closely related to my country's specific national conditions.
"At present, most of my country's data centers are located in the eastern region. Due to the increasing shortage of resources such as land and energy, it is difficult to develop large-scale data centers in the eastern region. The western region of my country has abundant resources, especially renewable energy, and has the ability to develop data centers. , to undertake the potential of eastern computing power demand." The responsible comrade of the High Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission said that for this reason, we must give full play to the advantages of my country's system and mechanism, integrate the layout from a national perspective, optimize the allocation of resources, and improve the efficiency of resource use.
Perfectly solve the problem of functional layout of data center
The implementation of the "East and West" project is considered to have many meanings.
The first thing to be mentioned is that it is conducive to improving the overall computing power level of the country.
Furthermore, it is conducive to promoting green development.
The comrades in charge of the High Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission analyzed that increasing the layout of data centers in the west will greatly increase the proportion of green energy use, and consume green energy in the west. Continuously optimize data center energy efficiency.
"The green energy in the west can first meet the energy demand of the local data center, so that the local carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals can be completed as soon as possible. The excess power can be traded with the eastern data center in the form of green power and carbon sink. "Analysis by Lu Tianwen.
Lu Tianwen believes that in the short term, the main gathering places for computing power-based data centers are still the first- and second-tier cities in the east, while underdeveloped regions and western regions with insufficient bandwidth resources can make use of abundant power resources to build storage-type data centers.
In addition, driving upstream and downstream investment in the industry and promoting coordinated regional development are also the meaning of the title.
"The construction of a data center mainly considers several major factors such as electricity, bandwidth, water, transportation, and talents. The 'East Numbers and West Calculations' project combines the advantageous resources of the east and the west, and can perfectly solve the functional layout problem of the data center." Lu Tianwen Say.
Energy saving, a topic that cannot be avoided
Regarding the general idea of the "East and West" project, the responsible comrade of the High Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission mentioned: moderate aggregation and intensive development; cascade layout and overall development; step-by-step and rapid iteration.
"Through the deployment of 8 computing power hubs across the country, we will guide large and super-large data centers to gather in the hubs to form data center clusters." The responsible comrade said that between the computing power hubs, a high-speed data transmission network will be opened to promote the eastern and western regions. Complementary and synergistic computing power.
In terms of the layout from east to west, the responsible comrade of the High Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission said that for background processing, offline analysis, storage backup and other services that do not require high network requirements, they can be the first to move westward and be undertaken by the Western Data Center; Some businesses with higher network requirements, such as disaster warning, can be deployed in eastern hubs such as the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
For the implementation of the "East and West" project, Lu Tianwen put forward some suggestions.
He pointed out: "Currently, there are relatively abundant electricity and water resources in the west, and transportation is relatively good; there is an urgent need to solve the bandwidth and talent factors."
In addition, the "East and West" project cannot bypass the energy consumption problem of the data center.
Lu Tianwen suggested, "turn the data center into an energy station".
"In addition to coordinating the distribution of new energy and electricity with the government, data center companies can also actively recover the heat generated during the operation of the data center and supply them to surrounding factories, commercial buildings and residential communities, which is not only profitable, but also offsets a large amount of heat. Electricity consumption." In his view, this is the most realistic solution.