For five years in a row, Huawei has released the Global Connectivity Index (GCI) report, including the latest GCI 2018. The index is proposed by Huawei and has now been recognized as a quantitative assessment of the status quo of a country’s digital economy.
GCI 2018 has identified artificial intelligence (AI) as the primal driver of new paradigms in digital economy development. It also points out that intelligent connectivity will create new business models, products, processes, and services, inject new vitality into each country, and kick-start a new cycle of economic growth.
The research also finds that integral to scale development of AI is the development of three key elements: algorithm, compute power, and computing data. Continuous, intensive investment in and deployment of information communications technology (ICT) infrastructure will breed the possibility for industry pursuers to make leapfrog development.
Two prevailing keywords of the GCI 2018 report are “intelligent” and “computing”.
This may in part explain why Huawei IT Server Product Line is hailing intelligent computing as a megatrend.
On May 31, the Huawei IT Intelligent Computing Product Line officially held a press meeting in Beijing to announce its intelligent computing business initiative based on the Boundless Computing strategy. The announcement amplifies Huawei’s commitment to taking customers fast-forward to an intelligent future through Boundless Computing and a full-stack AI computing platform.
Yesterday · Today · Tomorrow
The rise of Huawei servers is nothing but impressive.
Qiu Long, President of Huawei IT Intelligent Computing Product Line
In the past few years, the global server market landscape has been disrupted by the emergence of technologies and applications such as cloud computing and big data. Huawei claims an undisputed foothold on the top rung of the server market with its deposit of experience and relentless innovation over the past 16 years.
The success of Huawei servers in the current period is not only due to its long-term investment in R&D, but also owing to Huawei’s wisdom and executive power in seeing through the megatrend and riding the waves to achieve predominance. And mark my words, I say “current period” because I have good reasons to believe that Huawei has never nor will it settle for any achievements it has made. By “riding the waves” I mean correctly predicting and blazing a trail to the future.
Huawei believes that cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and AI will become the pivotal force to drive the server market forward. In the past few years, Huawei has been building its server business by staying laser focused on these technologies and the latest industry application requirements.
A case in point is that Huawei launched its Boundless Computing strategy last July. Through Boundless Computing and continuous innovation, Huawei aims to push beyond the boundaries of CPUs, servers, and data centers in the old computing world, and pave the way to a fully connected world.
Now, Huawei’s years of perseverance and hard work have paid off.
At Huawei IT Distributor Conference in January 2018, Qiu Long presented an impressive performance report of Huawei IT Intelligent Computing Product Line. According to the report, Huawei servers have maintained a compound growth rate of 32% over six straight years since Huawei entered the enterprise business in 2011.
Currently the global server market is at a new tipping point.
For the future that Huawei servers commit to deliver, all glories of the past hold no promise for tomorrow. Huawei servers must find a new pivot today to drive growth in the markets of tomorrow.
The pivot for Huawei servers is intelligent computing. It should be said that this is quite a deliberate decision. In fact, Huawei has been busy doing a lot of groundwork before the announcement of intelligent computing.
As said by Qiu Long, intelligent technologies are being infused into IT infrastructure. Before, IT infrastructure was no more than a supporting foundation for business. But now, IT infrastructure is playing a value-driving role for business. Coupled with the pervasive intelligence trend, the role of IT infrastructure will be even more instrumental.
Meanwhile, AI is catalyzing the updates and evolution of business models. Various intelligence-enabled applications are becoming more scenario-specific and clear-cut. The digital transformation of enterprises requires the support of more reliable and intelligent IT infrastructure.
For Huawei, the upping of the AI game means that Huawei does not simply view customer requirements as one-dimensional products. Instead, Huawei takes a more macro view to build intelligent computing systems for customers to better prep for the markets of today and tomorrow.
From the perspective of strategy, this is definitely an escalation of the game, which will help deliver on the constantly growing computing demands of customers. In addition, this well echoes with the latest dogma of Huawei IT Product Line: to herald an intelligent future with smart IT.
Computing Becomes the Name of the Game in Business Competition
Qiu Long believes that, with the burgeoning development of cloud computing, big data, and AI, enterprise services will have increasingly diversified requirements for computing resources. This is the grimmest challenge for IT infrastructure providers, including Huawei.
There is no doubt that computing is reshaping the world. In fact, this viewpoint has been again and again confirmed by the technology and economy development in the last several decades. This is also the reason why Intel has been continuously exploring the potential of Moore’s Law: the higher the compute speeds, the greater the benefits.
However, things are somewhat different in view of the current situation compared with any previous periods of time.
In the past, computing is only the IT capability translated solely from enterprises’ expenditure. Nowadays, computing has been deeply linked to business models. It not only provides low-cost and real-time services to massive numbers of customers, but also becomes the key to meeting users’ personalized requirements, at the same time achieving rapid iteration, self-update and improvement. Computing has become the name of the game for enterprises to fully tap into business opportunities and brace up for the future marketplace.
The core value of intelligent computing is that it can blend IT infrastructure with intelligence, implementing various intelligent applications, and moreover help enterprises accomplish digital transformation and further on to achieve intelligence-enabled operation, reaping greater productivity at lower costs.
Qiu Long said that intelligent computing mainly includes two levels of connotation, the technical level and the industrial level, which are interdependent and inseparable.
At the technical level, it’s an indisputable fact that global data center construction is gaining speeds, and on increasingly larger scale. It’s not rare to see equipment rooms with over one million servers. This requires the IT infrastructure to be sufficiently intelligent and capable of self-management and upgrade. An intelligent and autonomous IT infrastructure not only guarantees service quality but also helps drive down operating expense (OPEX).
At the same time, the traditional x86 architecture built around CPUs is no longer the optimal choice for handling massive computing requirements of applications such as AI. Instead, heterogeneous computing based on various computing units such as GPU, FPGA, and ASIC is emerging as a potent force to deliver blazing-fast intelligent development.
Take the Huawei GPU cloud-accelerating server as an example. A single physical node accommodates eight NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 GPU accelerators, providing excellent elastic scalability and ultimate computing capability. Users can use computing resources on demand, and save the usage costs of compute resources to the maximum extent.
At the industry level, intelligence enablement has become a key differentiator for enterprises. IT infrastructure will be transformed into intelligent solutions to help enterprises shift from digital operation to intelligent operation, and become the most powerful industry brain in the future digital world.
Emerging intelligent industries are also thriving. Products such as drones, robots, autonomous cars, and voice assistants are becoming a more and more common part of our daily work and life, which requires support from IT infrastructure with new levels of intelligence.
Based on the preceding considerations, Qiu Long explained that Huawei’s goal is to build a full-stack AI computing platform, reinvent data centers for cloud services, and pioneer the greatest technology revolution in human history with intelligent computing.
Intelligent Computing Poise to Unleash Full Potential
As mentioned above, CPUs are not the sole factor that determines the performance of a computing system. In the intelligent world, in addition to computing units such as GPUs, accelerator components such as SSDs also play a significant part.
At the same release ceremony, Huawei launched the ES3000 V5 NVMe SSD, one of its three major accelerator components, to provide higher performance, and higher levels of ease of use and intelligence for the entire system.
Qiu Long said that, compared with previous-generation products, ES3000 V5 has improved performance by over 50% and provides an application-oriented reference architecture, making it easier for customers to select the best-suited architecture based on their scenarios.
Meanwhile, ES3000 V5 supports an array of intelligent features such as smart multi-stream, atomic write, and intelligent O&M to ensure service QoS and take customer O&M experience to new heights.
Also at the press meeting, Huawei released the KunLun V5 Mission Critical Server. Currently, KunLun has built up its momentum and has been widely used in key industries both inside and outside China, including finance, telecom, energy, manufacturing, and government.
KunLun V5 is the industry’s only system that supports CPU and memory hot swap and supports both physical and logical partitioning. KunLun embraces the industry’s most complete open ecosystem. From processors to OSs, from databases to industry applications, Huawei has built an ecosystem encompassing many of the world’s top vendors.
Qiu Long believes that KunLun V5 can accelerate the transition of enterprise IT systems from closed to open architecture, achieve the highest level of reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS), and maintain strong flexibility and scalability to ensure always-on and continuously iterative mission-critical business.
Last year, Huawei unveiled the Atlas intelligent cloud hardware platform at HUAWEI CONNECT 2017, which has garnered industry attention since its debut. At the press meeting, Qiu Long and experts from Huawei IT Intelligent Computing Product Line introduced the latest progress of Atlas.
In the smart city domain, the G series heterogeneous server based Atlas has been applied by the Shenzhen Traffic Police Corps to build an “urban traffic brain”. The solution has improved the road capacity of Shenzhen by about 8% and delivered a 10x higher efficiency in traffic violation image recognition to enable more efficient, intelligent law enforcement. The project won the Safe City Award at Smart City Expo World Congress 2017 for its innovative practical and social significance.
Not long ago, the news has gone viral that a fugitive attending the concert of Jackie Zhang, a renowned singer, was caught after being recognized by the facial recognition system.
In fact, with the help of the Atlas-powered ultra-high density facial recognition solution jointly released by Huawei and SenseTime, it has become a regular practice to implement prewarning measures such as danger identification in crowded locations. The spotting of the fugitive at the concert is just another case in point.
Based on the GPU-accelerated Atlas hardware platform and the SenseTime algorithm, a single G series server can implement real-time processing of up to 224 channels of HD video streams. This solution also becomes the best AI solution with integrated software and hardware in its domain.
These examples are a few testaments to the charm of intelligent computing.
Leveraging intelligent computing, Huawei IT Intelligent Computing Product Line has been enabling the industry and speeding the intelligent transformation of enterprises, helping organizations get better positioned for the intelligent world.
The future is now, and intelligent computing is poise to unleash its full potential.
The post Intelligent Computing Is Bound to Change Our World appeared first on Huawei Enterprise Blog.
Source: Huawei Enterprise Blog
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