Our code is up
On the low-orbit satellite orbit hundreds to thousands of kilometers above the earth's surface, the dream of many young people is about to soar in space with several satellites.
Chen Shutong, a doctoral student supervised by Professor Liu Fangming of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and the friends of the OpenEdgeNeXt team are one of the young people.
In June this year, China Youth Daily, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and Huawei Cloud jointly launched the "Code to Space" solicitation activity.
Many young students, including Chen Shutong, were invited to develop innovative applications for satellites.
Their winning works will have the opportunity to be deployed in multiple satellites of the "Tiansu Constellation" project through the world's first cloud-native satellite computing platform, making the satellites "smarter".
The "Tiansu Constellation" project was jointly initiated by the Shenzhen Research Institute of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and the Tianyi Research Institute. The first pilot star was successfully launched in December 2021. It is expected that the first phase of network construction will be completed in 2023. After completion, it will become my country's scientific research center. A new force in the satellite field will also be one of the global satellite network technology innovation bases.
As the first batch of co-construction units of the "Tiansuan Constellation", HUAWEI CLOUD introduced concepts such as cloud native and edge-cloud collaboration into the field of space computing for the first time, realizing the intelligence of the satellite computing platform and giving the satellite the ability to "think".
On November 9, 2022, the results of the solicitation will be announced.
Eleven participating teams from all over the country won the awards. Among them, the OpenEdgeNeXt team of Huazhong University of Science and Technology won the championship with "CoStar: A Satellite-Earth Collaborative Remote Sensing Image Analysis System Based on Dynamic Segmentation of Neural Network Model"; from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan University, Beijing Five teams from scientific research institutes such as the University of Posts and Telecommunications, China Telecom Research Institute, and Beijing Boundary Space Technology Co., Ltd. won the winning prize.
"Space and satellites seem no longer far away from us, and our code is about to go to the sky!" These young teams are full of vigor and full of expectations for the future.
The written code is no longer "lying" in the laboratory
As the instructor of the champion team OpenEdgeNeXt, Huazhong University of Science and Technology professor and doctoral supervisor Liu Fangming is most impressed that through this competition, he and his students had an excellent practice opportunity, and the code written is no longer just an experiment. In the office, it is closely integrated with the real big scene and real data, facing the practical problems in the application, and "better landing".
He told the reporter of China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily, "This time it can be combined with the competition to promote learning and research through competition, which provides better conditions for the transformation of achievements."
Liu Fangming has been engaged in the research of distributed systems and networks, cloud computing and edge computing for a long time, and has been approved for many domestic and foreign patents. He has won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award and the first prize of the Ministry of Education Natural Science Award.
In his words, the company provides a basic platform, publishes "valuable scenarios", and presents real problems that plague the industry.
The teachers and students of colleges and universities have enough accumulation in key technologies to come as developers and challenge the competition.
This "new model" allows college teachers and students to "come together" with industrial platforms to jointly solve cross-combined practical problems such as cloud computing, satellite-terrestrial collaboration, and artificial intelligence. The integration of production and education is a "win-win process."
"In the past, we worked on key technologies and prototype systems. It was really difficult to transform the results, but this time we don't have to worry about it. Huawei provides the open source cloud-native edge computing platform KubeEdge and the edge-cloud collaborative AI framework Sedna. There are also elastic cloud servers, cloud native services, etc., as well as Shengsi MindSpore, which gave strong support to the participating teams, we did not have to build the system from scratch, and the efficiency of deployment and operation and maintenance was greatly improved." Liu Fangming said.
OpenEdgeNeXt team members include 4 PhD students and 1 master student in Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Team leader Chen Shutong and technicians Pei Qiangyu, Wu Jing, and Hu Jiahai, some have published top academic papers, some have won national invention patents, and Hu Haichuan, who just entered school, once led the team to win the second prize of ASC in the World University Supercomputing Competition .
Before participating in the competition, Chen Shutong always felt that space and satellites were far away from him.
It wasn't until she wrote the code for the satellite this time that she discovered that the technology used on the satellite was closely related to her research direction.
She couldn't help feeling that the team's scientific research accumulation can also be used in space.
"This makes us feel that the distance between space and us has been shortened a lot. This is also the result of our participation in the competition. Our vision has been opened up, and the future direction is also broader and more upright." Chen Shutong has been interested in computers since childhood , in the process of scientific research, she can feel the fun.
The OpenEdgeNeXt team innovatively proposed a satellite-ground collaborative remote sensing analysis framework, named CoStar.
This new solution can divide the remote sensing image model into two, and the spaceborne equipment and the ground station data center respectively execute the two parts of the model in the cloud and the edge, realizing fine-grained, adaptive, and diversified satellite-ground collaboration, which can serve Various application services related to national economy and people's livelihood such as disaster monitoring and resource detection.
This brand-new neural network model dynamic segmentation mechanism, if installed on a satellite, is 2.97 times more efficient than the traditional solution.
In addition, CoStar not only meets the accuracy of reasoning, but also reduces resource consumption, and the average bandwidth demand rate is greatly reduced.
"This solution has huge technical advantages in improving reasoning efficiency and saving energy consumption. After commercial conversion, it is estimated that it can save more than 100 million yuan in costs every year." Liu Fangming looked forward.
Young people can also get in touch with the "tall" like satellite rockets
During the competition, the teams who came to unveil the list showed their talents.
Based on cloud-native, edge computing, AI, big data and other technologies, combined with the cloud-native satellite computing platform, they created one work after another, showing the momentum of going to heaven.
These "want to go to the sky" codes revolve around satellite-related applications, can accelerate the process of satellite computing intelligence, and help satellites better serve social fields such as emergency communications, ecological monitoring, disaster prevention and mitigation, and urban construction.
The "Teaching and Experimental Building Team" from the School of Remote Sensing, Wuhan University has built a "cloud-pipe-edge-end" integrated satellite-ground integrated incremental learning fire detection system to help global wildfire monitoring and early warning, and can effectively support global emergencies Emergency response to devastating and large-scale wildfires, timely protection of public life and property safety and national ecological security.
The participating team from the "China Telecom Research Institute" completed a cloud-native satellite-ground collaborative ship detection solution, which is applied to the field of satellite + smart coastal defense, which can help modern seaport construction and maritime traffic management, and realize ship yaw, collision, etc. The real-time risk assessment function can quickly plan a safe rescue route and improve the ability of maritime emergency response and rescue.
In addition to scientific research units such as universities and research institutes, this "Code to Space" competition has also received widespread attention from enterprises.
The "Tianma Xingkong" team composed of five interns from Beijing Boundary Space Technology Co., Ltd. won the winning prize in this competition.
Team leader Zhu Zuo originally thought that satellites are a very distant thing for everyone, and the threshold for contact is also high.
But in the past two years, he found that more and more practitioners are actively investing in satellite applications.
He told reporters from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily, "It may be a few years before we will find that there will be more satellite-based applications. Some new mobile phones released this year have short message functions based on Beidou satellites. In the future, people will use more capabilities of satellites. Satellites can provide more help to our lives."
The conventional network protocol IP is not used between satellites in low earth orbit and the ground.
Moreover, the original intention of using the traditional satellite-ground protocol design is to transmit telemetry and remote control signals, which is not suitable for the current massive computing needs, which has become the pain point of the satellite-ground interconnection.
In response to this problem, these unconstrained young people formed a "Tianma Xingkong" team and developed a Xingdichanglian agent program called "Pingpeng".
They "opened up the universal link from the satellite to the ground", which can connect the star network and the ground network without any effect, so that the satellite and the server can interact directly.
In the words of team member Si Jianing, "Pingpeng" is like a transshipment company for overseas shopping, helping information to be transferred between the ground and satellites, simplifying the process and lowering the threshold.
The "screen tent" solves the problem of satellite-ground interconnection, and also provides great convenience for developers. Any application using the IP protocol can be deployed on the satellite without any need to perceive the specific scenario of the satellite. Internet”, and even “everyone’s code goes to space”.
"We hope that satellites are not only done by the country, but that more and more developers can use these things at low cost." Si Jianing said with emotion that young developers can also work with space. , Rockets, satellites and other high-level words are connected.
Use your own hands to make satellites "smart"
The opportunity for Si Jianing to become interested in satellites was the torrential rain in Zhengzhou, Henan in July 2021.
He was in Zhengzhou at the time and witnessed the disaster.
One thing that impressed him deeply and hit him hard was that when the flood flooded the communication base station, the mobile phone signal and the electricity in the subway station were affected to a certain extent, and a lot of information could not be transmitted in time.
"We actually have a way to solve this problem. Although the network on the ground is not available all the time, satellites can open another way to life for us." He said.
Si Jianing couldn't help but imagine that if in an emergency, the mobile phone signal can be sent back to the ground through satellites, "too many people will not be blocked in information islands" when the base station is not available.
He said with emotion that even if the link is available for one more second, maybe a message sent in time can save a carload of people.
At first, Si Jianing's research direction was in the field of 5G core network. Since then, he has been in the satellite field.
The young man hopes that if there are sudden natural disasters such as fires and strong winds in the future, he can use the technology he developed to allow rescue to arrive one minute earlier and decision-making information to be released one second earlier, saving one more life.
Liu Fangming also told reporters that one of the applications of the remote sensing technology designed by OpenEdgeNeXt is emergency rescue and disaster relief, which is related to the national economy and the people's livelihood and the health of people's lives and properties.
He mentioned that the news of wildfires in various places in recent years is very touching.
And through satellites, remote sensing images, AI reasoning, combined with historical experience, can detect in time that a wildfire has occurred in a certain place, or even "smoke".
"A large number of technologies on the ground have the opportunity to be used in the special environment on the satellite, which was something that was unthinkable before. After the development of space cloud computing, we who are ground computer technology people can have the opportunity to contribute technology. There are We must not lag behind in related plans, from following, to running together, to leading.” He told reporters,
Liu Fangming was the first to come into contact with the information of this competition and keenly combined with his own research accumulation, he immediately guided his students to form a team.
At first, he found that these young people were beating drums in their hearts and had no confidence, so he encouraged everyone, "This opportunity to combine theory with practice is very rare."
And after the competition, many bottlenecks and innovations achieved in the research process can publish new high-level papers.
OpenCloudNeXt, another award-winning team he directed, studied the problem of satellite-ground collaborative scheduling, that is, the scheduling of calculations and deployment of applications between multiple satellites, and also gained a lot.
"In the future, I can tell others that my code has gone to heaven." Liu Fangming believes in the potential of these young people, and also believes in their endless energy.
He believes that these are the greatest advantages of young people, as long as they are given guidance and resources to let them do it boldly.
"Computer is an engineering subject that is problem-solving and result-oriented. If we compare human knowledge to a sphere, I hope that I can put my own small drum on this sphere and make a small extension of knowledge in the computer field. , and can make a useful system.” Hu Haichuan, a “novice Xiaobai” of the team, said.
Every young man who sends a code to the sky aims at the stars and the sea.
China Youth Daily China Youth Daily reporter Zhang Miao Source: China Youth Daily