Huawei Cloud's Zheng Yelai: Diversified computing power drives application innovation

As science and technology develops at an increasingly rapid pace, production methods and life are undergoing disruptive changes. The future value of technology deserves to be interpreted and explored in more depth.

On December 13, the third EmTech China Global Emerging Technology Summit was held in Beijing. Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei Cloud Business, attended the meeting and delivered a keynote speech entitled "Diverse Computing Power Driving Application Innovation". He proposed that the cloud is becoming the infrastructure of the information world, and diverse computing power on the cloud will become the norm, driving the advancement of computing technology and application innovation.

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Zheng Yelai, President of Huawei Cloud Business (Source: EmTech China)

Cloud is becoming the infrastructure of the information world

Computers were officially introduced in the 1950s. Since then, the global per capita GDP has accelerated, and there has been a strong demand for computing in business and life, as well as in technology and industry development. Zheng Yelai believes that computing power is not just a description of computing ability, but has become the basic ability of the entire information world. In the AI ​​era, the information world's demand for computing power, a basic ability, has become more prominent.

The basic unit of computing power is the chip, but from the perspective of the whole society, how to realize the supply of computing power to thousands of industries? Zheng Yelai said that the most popular way to supply computing power is the cloud. Today, the cloud is becoming the infrastructure of the entire information world - at the front end, that is, the cloud usage level, the cloud gathers a large number of applications; at the back end, that is, the cloud supply level, it gathers a huge amount of computing power.

At present, the cloud is no longer just "exclusive" to the Internet industry. A large number of enterprise applications are also using the cloud to achieve digital transformation. Personal applications, including a large number of mobile applications, are also using cloud services, with 200 mobile phones corresponding to one server. In addition, there are a large number of industry applications, such as Huawei's CRM/ERP systems, which are all built on the cloud.

So, is it computing power that drives applications, or applications that drive computing power? In this regard, Zheng Yelai believes that the relationship between the two is complementary - the cloud originates from the advancement of computing technology and will also drive computing innovation and development.

In the 21st century, rule-based computing power represented by CPUs became oversupplied, which led to the emergence of the cloud. It can be said that the cloud brings together various workloads, which in turn will drive innovation and progress in various types of computing, especially statistical computing and hybrid computing characterized by statistics and rules.

In the future, in higher-dimensional information space, perhaps higher-dimensional rules suitable for the cloud will be developed. These rules are different from the rules of human prior knowledge and the "new rules" that are different from the rules of physics. This may be the development direction of AI. For example, Alpha GO has discovered some support for three thousand years of Go knowledge that humans have never discovered.

Diversified computing power on the cloud has become the norm, providing more complete infrastructure services

In recent decades, CPU has been playing an important role. However, after the emergence of NPU, which mainly focuses on statistical computing capabilities, the combination of CPU and NPU will provide more complete infrastructure services to thousands of industries in a diversified computing power manner.

At the same time, in the next 10 years, when the computing power of data centers (DCs) increases, data centers will become computing centers (CCs), including clouds and enterprise-built computing centers. Clouds are essentially large-scale computing centers; and in such computing centers, AI-based computing loads will exceed 80% of the computing power of the entire computing center. The lack of computing power in computing centers will seriously hinder industry innovation and application.

When the computing power structure on the cloud changes, diversified computing power on the cloud will become the norm. Zheng Yelai said: As the infrastructure of the information world, the cloud not only builds a "broad-based" underlying architecture, but also supports "a hundred flowers blooming" upper-level applications - not only various classic industry applications, but also innovative applications on the cloud, such as cloud computers, cloud phones, AR/VR, etc., and even artificial intelligence applications for the future intelligent era.

In addition, Zheng Yelai also emphasized that as an information highway, the rapid development of 5G will bring about new changes, will become the infrastructure for the entire social transformation, and will accelerate the intelligent upgrading of the industry.

Future development is beyond imagination, and diversified computing power drives application innovation

Nowadays, technology is developing at a rapid pace, and our imagination is being overturned time and time again, just like when computers first appeared.

Zheng Yelai recalled that when he first joined Huawei 20 years ago, one of the challenges we faced was the "millennium bug" problem in computers. Looking back at that time, we had concerns and hopes, and all kinds of opinions flooded the Internet. But in any case, at that time we could not imagine the development of the computing industry today.

Therefore, future development may be imaginable, but it will definitely exceed our imagination.

Zheng Yelai said: "Today, computing has not only become everyone's reach (with mobile phones as the carrier), but also the foundation for the intelligent transformation of thousands of industries. When the productivity of various industries is combined with computing power, business efficiency is bound to be greatly improved, and the room for improvement will be beyond our imagination."

From the perspective of development, how to obtain computing power, how to reduce business costs, and how to improve business efficiency have become issues that companies need to think about urgently. Zheng Yelai concluded that cloud infrastructure is a very good solution. First, the cloud has multiple computing capabilities; second, it drives the advancement of computing technology to keep computing power advanced, such as making computing power heterogeneous, pooled, and service-oriented; finally, it can adapt to the development of corporate business and provide multiple computing power in a timely and zero-inventory manner. All of these can enable companies to reduce cost waste, increase business value, and thus achieve business innovation.

At present, the intelligent world of the Internet of Everything is accelerating. Huawei Cloud is committed to providing stable, reliable, secure, trustworthy, and sustainable cloud services for thousands of industries, creating affordable, easy-to-use, and reliable inclusive AI, so that technology can be implemented in industry practices and enterprises can more calmly cope with the intelligent era.