Text / Zhou Rui
Recently, the National Development and Reform Commission and other departments jointly issued a notice agreeing to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes in 8 places including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu, and Ningxia, and planned 10 nodes. A national data center cluster, which means that the overall layout design of the national integrated big data center system has been completed, and the “East Number and West Calculation” project has been officially launched.
After the power transmission from west to east and the water transfer from south to north, China has once again launched a large-scale cross-regional resource allocation in its vast territory.
East and West computing will become an important infrastructure for China's future development, especially the development of data.
Unbalanced computing space
In "East Number and West Calculation", "number" refers to data, and "calculation" refers to computing power, that is, the ability to process data.
"Dongshuxishu will guide the computing power demand in the east to the west in an orderly manner by building a new computing power network system integrating data center, cloud computing and big data.
The reason for this arrangement lies in the foreseeable surge in computing power demand in China's future development and the foreseeable bottleneck in the supply of computing power.
At present, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is reshaping the global economic structure.
As the core productivity of the digital economy, computing power has become the new focus of global strategic competition.
The relevant person in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission revealed that as of now, the scale of my country's data centers 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.
Computing power has become an important infrastructure for the development of the national economy.
Accelerating the construction of computing power will effectively stimulate the innovation vitality of data elements, accelerate the process of digital industrialization and industrial digitization, give birth to new technologies, new industries, new business forms, and new models, and support high-quality economic development.
However, China's supply of computing power is facing challenges.
From the perspective of spatial distribution, at present, most of my country's data centers are located in the east. Under the situation of tight land and other resources, it is difficult to develop large-scale data centers in the east.
Moreover, the operation of the data center requires power support, and the energy consumption alone makes the eastern region unaffordable.
Therefore, in order to meet the rapidly growing computing power demand in the country, especially in the eastern region, there must be support from the west, but there is a lot of knowledge in how to support it.
Watts and Bits Multiple Choice Questions
As for how to play the supporting role of the West, policy makers are faced with a multiple-choice question. Visually speaking, is it sending watts or sending bits?
To send watts, is to choose to deploy a large number of data centers in the east, and at the same time give play to the energy advantages of the west, send electricity to the east, and support the east data center to form a computing power supply.
Sending bits is to choose to build a large-scale data center in the west, obtain computing power through the local use of energy, and send data to the east to support the demand for computing power in the east.
The pros and cons of the two options are clear.
Sending watts and building a large-scale data center in the east can reduce the impact of network delays, but on the one hand, it cannot solve the problem of land shortage, and on the other hand, long-distance power transmission will cause energy loss of about 10%.
Sending bits and building a large-scale data center in the west will greatly reduce energy loss, and there is no such problem with optical fiber transmission of digital signals. What needs to be paid attention to is only the factor of network delay.
Therefore, the plan to send bits finally came to the surface, and the official decided to build a large-scale data center in the west to form computing power to support the demand in the east and realize the calculation of the east and the west.
Key words: Intensive, Gradient, Iteration
According to the relevant person in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission, there are three major ideas for the calculation of the east and the west.
One is to promote the moderate agglomeration and intensive development of data centers across the country.
Through the deployment of 8 computing power hubs across the country, large and super-large data centers are guided to gather in the hubs to form data center clusters.
Give full play to the effect of scale and intensification, increase policy support, improve the scale and efficiency of the overall computing power, and drive the development of upstream and downstream industries related to data centers.
Between the computing power hubs, open up the high-speed data transmission network, strengthen cloud-network integration and multi-cloud collaboration, promote the efficient complementarity and collaborative linkage of computing power between the east and the west, and accelerate the realization of the rational layout of national data centers, optimization of supply and demand, green intensification and interconnection.
The second is to promote the layout and overall development of data centers from east to west.
On the one hand, accelerate the large-scale deployment of data centers westward, especially for businesses that do not require high network requirements, such as back-end processing, offline analysis, and storage backup, can be the first to move westward and be undertaken by Western Data Center.
On the other hand, due to the delay caused by long-distance network transmission and related supporting facilities, Western Data Center cannot meet all computing power requirements.
Some businesses with high network requirements, such as industrial Internet, financial securities, disaster warning, telemedicine, video calls, artificial intelligence reasoning, etc., can be deployed in eastern hubs such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, etc. Inside the hub, it is necessary to focus on promoting the transfer of data centers from first-tier cities to surrounding areas to ensure the coordination and sustainability of computing power deployment and resources such as land, energy, water, and electricity.
The third is to realize the step-by-step and rapid iteration of "East and West".
In order to resolutely avoid the blind development of data centers, in the current initial stage, 10 data center clusters have been planned and established in 8 computing power hubs, the physical boundaries have been demarcated, and development goals such as green energy saving and listing rate have been clarified.
For example, the average availability rate of data centers in the cluster must reach at least 65%, and the utilization rate of renewable energy must be significantly improved.
Through the constraints of multiple indicators, the high standards and strict requirements of the cluster are promoted, and the start-up is minimized.
The cluster development will be dynamically monitored, and the development level and saturation of the cluster computing power will be scientifically evaluated.
Based on the development situation, we will continue to optimize and improve the layout in the future, expand cluster boundaries or increase clusters in a timely manner, demonstrate the establishment of new computing power hubs, and achieve coordinated, orderly and healthy development of computing power.
Three birds with one stone policy choice
The advancement of counting the east and the west will bring about the effect of killing three birds with one stone.
The first is to upgrade the computing power supply system.
Through the large-scale and intensive effects of the 8 computing power hubs, the overall computing power scale and efficiency of the region where the computing power hub is located can be improved, and the development of upstream and downstream industries related to data centers can be driven.
Between the computing power hubs, optimize the network structure, open up the high-speed data transmission network, strengthen cloud-network integration and multi-cloud collaboration, promote the efficient complementation and synergistic linkage of computing power between the east and the west, and accelerate the realization of a reasonable layout of nationwide data centers, supply-demand balance, green Intensive and interconnected.
The second is to drive the economic development of the eastern and western regions.
The east, where the demand for computing power is growing rapidly, can undoubtedly benefit from the calculation of the east and the west. For the west, the construction of the data center also provides a strong growth impetus.
This driving force stems from the extremely long industrial chain involved in the construction and operation of data centers, which includes not only traditional civil engineering, but also many industries such as IT equipment manufacturing, information communication, basic software, and green energy supply. The chain is long, covers a wide range of categories, and has a large driving effect.
To coordinate and optimize the layout and promote the precise development of data centers will effectively drive upstream and downstream investment in the industry.
The third is to support the digital transformation of SMEs.
For small and medium-sized enterprises, computing power will be the infrastructure for data transformation in the future. The computing power network constructed by Eastern Digital and Western Computing can promote the construction of data centers according to local conditions and achieve differentiated and complementary development, thereby avoiding repeated investment, Repeat construction.
Through the use of emerging technologies and models such as cloud-network collaboration and multi-cloud collaboration, the level of data center intensification is further improved, the efficiency of resource utilization is improved, and more abundant cloud services are provided for small and medium-sized enterprises. Digital transformation.