China's computing industry improves efficiency to ease computing power shortage
Source: Xinhua Editor: huaxia 2023-10-20 18:44:30
China recently unveiled an action plan to beef up its computing power infrastructure, aiming to achieve total computing power of over 300 EFLOPS by 2025.
Despite the growing supply of computing power in the country, the surge of the large model industry in China has brought challenges, such as a shortage of computing power and mounting energy consumption, which the computing industry is working to overcome.
Green Computing Power
EFLOPS is a measurement unit used to determine a computer's speed. A 1 EFLOPS computing system can complete 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second. It takes a large amount of energy to support the operation of such computing capacity.
China's computing industry has strived to meet the demand for computing power by reducing consumption and increasing efficiency, including optimizing data center refrigeration systems and improving the efficiency of computing applications, according to a report by Science and Technology Daily.
He Zhengyu, Ant Group's chief technology officer, said more power is used for the daily operation of servers, when compared with power usage for computing services. A data center currently tends to use less than 20 percent of its energy for computing tasks.
According to a white paper released by Ant Group and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, to achieve greater overall energy saving and emissions reduction, the industry should focus on "end-to-end green computing," meaning green computing from electricity production and computing power production to computing power application.
In electricity production, data centers can optimize the use of clean energy and new energy storage. Concerning computing power production, data centers can choose an efficient IT system, refrigeration system, and power supply and distribution system to raise computing efficiency.
The white paper said there is much room left for improvement in computing power application, such as raising the utilization rate of the software platform and efficiency of applications and algorithms, or allocating computing resources in a more dynamic and flexible way.
The industry has already started green updates of data centers. In Shanghai, energy-saving methods such as liquid cooling and indirect evaporation natural cooling, and green energy sources like hydrogen fuel cells, have been introduced in some data centers.
Computing Power Scheduling
One way to raise the efficiency of existing computing power is by connecting different computing servers to a network and allocating computing resources to meet application demands through computing power scheduling, just like transportation of water or transmission of electricity.
Gao Wen, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that one of the major challenges facing China's computing power network is computing power scheduling, as entrance standards, systems and pricing standards of service providers are different.
Over the past two years, a number of computing power scheduling platforms which can meet the needs of diverse business application scenarios by integrating computing power resources from different sources, types and architectures have emerged in China.
National (Shanghai) New-type Internet Exchange Point (SHIXP) is a major pilot program for computing power scheduling and trading in the country. At the end of July, the SHIXP officially launched China's first national computing power trading platform.
Currently, the SHIXP has 14 computing network nodes and hosts 40 enterprises. It has access to eight domestic mainstream computing operators, with a total bandwidth of 1.82 TB, and a cumulative computing power of more than 156,000 trillion per second.
Wei Zheng, an official with the Shanghai Communications Administration, suggested that the country should establish a computing power scheduling standard for cloud service suppliers to provide unified and measurable computing services.
Adaptation of Software and Hardware
Despite these efficiency improvement efforts, China's computing industry still needs to make progress in multiple fields, such as underlying technology development, software adaptation, and application scenarios.
According to Ge Lunqing, an official with the Shanghai Communications Administration, China is still facing the challenge of domestic software adaptation in computing power supply. Many domestic chipmakers are developing open-source software and hardware independently, resulting in inefficient competition.
He suggested that industrial organizations, such as various alliances and associations, should help computing power suppliers reach consensus to break down the technical and ecological barriers between them, and strengthen R&D and application of software and hardware.
Xie Cun, a senior official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said that to meet the needs of computing power development, the industry should promote innovation in computing architecture, methods and algorithms.
The industry should focus on the building of software and hardware ecosystems related to computing power, and strengthen the adaptation and coordination of hardware, basic software and application software, he added.
