Top of the Great Era

Chapter 1349 Supercomputer

Zhou Buqi called He Yang, Meng Houkun, Yang Zhenkun, Zhou Feng and others to go to Lenovo to investigate their supercomputer project.

Along the way, expert Yang Zhenkun introduced the concept of supercomputing HPC.

At that time, he was the chief scientist of Lenovo Research Institute and the core backbone of Lenovo's HPC team. Because of differences in technical directions, he left Lenovo to join Ziweixing to deepen distributed research and lay the foundation for cloud computing in the future.

In some respects, supercomputing and cloud computing are left and right hands.

They all use the parallel relationship to connect some low-priced, low-performance hardware through technical means to achieve the effect of supercomputing.

The difference is that HPC is more focused on computing. In addition to computing, cloud computing also includes a series of supporting ecology such as infrastructure, software, and platforms.

But this does not mean that the technical level of cloud computing is higher than that of HPC.

The ecology of cloud computing is better than supercomputing, and the computing power of supercomputing is stronger than cloud computing.

In order to save costs, the cloud computing platform also cooperates with supercomputer providers to deploy HPC supercomputing on the cloud computing platform when encountering a large amount of calculation.

For example, an animation company receives an order and needs to complete the animation production within 3 months with a lot of computing power.But after 3 months, they no longer need these abilities.

If the equipment is purchased for maintenance, the cost is very high, what should I do?
The answer is cloud computing.

For the cloud computing platform, this kind of calculation is also extremely large. Too much computing power needs to be deployed, and it needs to be turned on and running 7*24 hours, and the maintenance cost is also too high.In order to save costs, the cloud computing platform can ask HPC for help to reduce expenses.

In particular, it can be seen that HPC is an unpopular and high-level technical direction, and the scope of marketization should be extremely small, and only a few industries can be applied, such as weather forecasting, oil exploration, chip mapping, aerospace defense, gene sequencing, image processing , biopharmaceuticals, etc.Not to mention ordinary people, 99% of enterprises have never heard of HPC in their lifetime.

Yang Zhenkun said: "There are more than a dozen supercomputing platforms in China, like the two deployed by the Meteorological Bureau and Daqing Oilfield. The projects are really good."

"What about domestic products?"

"Differs greatly."

"I heard that there is already a supercomputing center in Shanghai."

"It's no use at all."

Yang Zhenkun came out of this field, so he knows it very well.

Zhou Buqi asked: "What's the matter?"

Yang Zhenkun said: "The two HPCs deployed by the Meteorological Bureau and Daqing Oilfield are produced by IBM and have a high degree of application. The supercomputing center in Shanghai is a cooperation between Suguang and some universities. The amount of calculation is quite high, but there is no way to do it." Use it, but the compatibility is not good. The supercomputing center in Shanghai, the country’s idea is very good, and it provides chips, genes, pharmaceuticals and other fields, but even the operating system and software cannot be deployed well.”

Zhou Feng nodded, "Technology must compromise with the market. No matter how advanced the technology is, the market will not accept it. Hardware, operating system and software must be highly coordinated."

Yang Zhenkun shook his head and sighed very much, "Technology is not good enough, and considering the market, it is even worse."

Zhou Buqi asked: "I heard that 'Tianhe-[-]' was not developed in China, the top five in the world? Isn't that amazing?"

"It was done by the national team. It is said that the investment is tens of billions..." Yang Zhenkun felt a little helpless. Funding doesn't care about cost-effectiveness, just stack chips. The HPC of 'Tianhe-[-]' is larger than this building. The prospect of marketization is zero, and the possibility of compatibility is zero. All industrial software on the market cannot run. "

Zhou Buqi frowned, "What does that mean? Technology for technology's sake?"

Yang Zhenkun said: "For aerospace defense, the security is higher. However, if you want to really apply it, it is impossible without ten or eight years of continuous investment. The overall technology is too immature."

Zhou Buqi nodded.

If it is a military industry, there is no reason to talk about it, and it cannot be judged by the logic of the market.

Yang Zhenkun went on to say: "In the past few years, Lenovo's main PC business has poor technical content, and the R&D investment is not high. Most of the R&D funds have been invested in supercomputers, which is a market-oriented route. If Lenovo's products None of them are suitable, and there is no suitable one in China, so just look for HP."

If it is ten years later, it must be looking for Lenovo.They started to develop HPC in 2002, and after more than ten years of research, they have reached the top of the world.

But there is still a long way to go, and the research time is too short.

In the current list of the world's top 500 supercomputers, 212 are from HP, 188 from IBM, and only 6 from Lenovo. The gap is huge.

Fortunately, the batch of HPCs that cooperate with the public security system do not have that high performance requirements, that is, data query, DNA and fingerprint comparison, and image processing. It is enough to purchase a batch of low-priced and low-performance HPCs.

However, the HPC donated to the Multimedia Laboratory of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is specially used in scientific research experiments, so it cannot be too bad.

……

After going to Lenovo, Yang Yuanqing came to greet him and accompanied him personally.

Recently, Mr. Yang's life can be described as mixed with sorrow and joy.

The joy is that Lenovo has entered the list of the world's top 500 selected by "Fortune", ranking 499th, and is the only domestic private enterprise on the list.In the past few years, it was widely said that Founder and Haier, which were most likely to become the first non-monopolistic market operation in China and entered the world's top 500 companies, failed to make the list.This wave is relatively bright.

The sad thing is that in the past fiscal year under the economic crisis, Lenovo led by him suffered a relatively large loss for the first time after going public. In an emergency, Mr. Liu came back and re-planned and adjusted the corporate strategy.He had no choice but to fight again.

However, in front of the guests, Mr. Yang still showed a smile like a spring breeze.

"Huh? Boss Liu isn't here?"

"He's on the holding side."

"Oh."

Zhou Buqi nodded, this matter has caused a lot of trouble recently.Boss Liu wants to take advantage of the economic crisis to control Legend Holdings in his own hands, instead of having more than 50% of the state-owned assets as before, and the decision-making power, personnel, and financial rights are all decided by the state, and he has raised a group of nepotism , The tissue structure is too edematous.

This kind of thing is too risky, and most people dare not participate.Not to mention participating, I dare not even touch it.Wang Shi even left the house early.But Fanhai Boss Lu is not afraid, he is a member of the Standing Committee of the clapping meeting, and he is full of confidence.

Zhou Buqi is not involved in these things, mainly focusing on HPC.

If it goes well, this wave of orders may reach about 5 million.In the future, there will be about 1 million equipment updates, maintenance, and upgrades every year.

This amount of money is really a booster for Lenovo's HPC business, which has been invested for many years but has not produced any output, and can also support their development in this direction.

The HPC market has no effect in the short term, and the hottest fields in the next few years will be cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things.But in a few years, with the accelerated innovation and breakthrough of next-generation information and communication technologies such as 5G, Internet of Things, cloud computing, and big data, computing power will become a new productivity in the era of digital economy, and the big stage of HPC will come. After 15-20 years.

Let's endure it!
Persistence is victory.

Fortunately, Lenovo also paid enough attention to this field. Yang Yuanqing invited a blue-eyed and big-nosed foreigner, saying that he came from the United States on a special trip. His name was Brad Smith, and he was the chief scientist of Lenovo's American Research Institute.

Then, he whispered a lot.

It is said that during the development of HPC, several different representative technologies have emerged, such as vector computers, HPC with multi-processor shared memory, and cluster systems built with multiple nodes.

From the current point of view, due to various reasons, vector computers and pure memory sharing HPC systems have gradually been eliminated. Now the cluster architecture is the mainstream and has an absolute dominance. Basically, 90% of HPC systems are This structure...

Other Zhou Buqi can't understand it either.

But he understands the cluster architecture very well.

This is the technical direction of cloud computing. It also connects countless servers together and works in a clustered way.

Yang Yuanqing said with a smile: "At that time, we actually had two paths in the choice of technology direction. One was cloud computing, and the other was computer supercomputing. After careful consideration, we decided to develop HPC. If Lenovo made cloud computing, Maybe there will be no Ziweiyun."

Zhou Buqi laughed a few times, but didn't expose him.

Even if he is telling the truth, it is impossible to do cloud computing with Lenovo's strength.

Not to mention Lenovo, IBM, HP, and Dell all do supercomputers.The development of cloud computing relies on Internet companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

Supercomputing is hardware, an extension from PC to HPC, and the core is a computer.

What cloud computing does is ecology, which is the platform, system and application software deployed on the cloud server, and the core is the Internet.

Immediately, Brad, an expert from the United States, said a very important point - the combination of software and hardware.

"HPC products have many parameters. Under the same cost constraints, there is room for optimization in parameter selection and configuration of software and hardware. Usually, when the customer's program and application remain unchanged, the optimized system may It can bring 10%~20% performance improvement or convenience in use and management to customers."

"Depend on!"

Zhou Buqi cursed secretly in his heart, saying that the Americans are indeed monkey spirits, and this sales method is quite powerful.

Now I can only buy Lenovo.

This kind of thing really can't be careless.

The image processing system developed by Ziweixing is world-class. It combines the research results of Shen Xiangyang's artificial intelligence vision team and the multimedia laboratory of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. It can determine the person through any deterministic blurred picture. His identity will greatly assist the police in handling cases.

The Department of Computer Science of the Chinese University of Hong Kong is ranked 27th in the world, and Shen Xiangyang represents the highest level in the field of computer vision. Even if Americans have the latest research results, they may not be much better.

Software and hardware optimization means that the software side and the hardware side cooperate to make adjustments based on software requirements and hardware performance.If you purchase foreign brands such as IBM, HP, Dell, Sony, etc., you have to cooperate with them to carry out software analysis... Isn't this exposed?

Just like the national team has to develop "Tianhe-[-]" without hesitating huge sums of money and enduring huge waste, some things really cannot be left in the hands of foreigners.

(End of this chapter)