Huawei launches Fertile Soil Plan 2.0, investing US$1.5 billion over the next five years to help developers build the computing industry

At HUAWEI CONNECT 2019, Huawei officially launched the Fertile Soil Plan 2.0 for developers, announcing that it will invest $1.5 billion in the next five years and welcomes enterprises and individual developers to participate in the ecological development of the computing industry. At the same time, Huawei Kunpeng Developer Kit was released, and the one-stop AI development management platform ModelArts 2.0 was upgraded and released to support developers to carry out simple and efficient software development on Kunpeng and Ascend computing platforms.

Huawei Fertile Soil Plan 2.0 released

Huawei officially releases Fertile Soil Plan 2.0, welcoming developers to participate in the ecological development of the computing industry

Since the release of the Fertile Soil 1.0 plan at the first Huawei Developer Conference in 2015, Huawei has gradually open-sourced its CT products, cloud services, Ascend AI computing, Kunpeng computing capabilities, etc., and established 21 OpenLabs around the world to build developer communities, hold developer competitions and talent certifications, etc. After four years of development, Huawei now has 1.3 million registered developers, and more than 14,000 corporate developer partners are working with Huawei to innovate products and solutions to create value for customers.

Huawei Cloud & AI Product and Service CTO Zhang Shunmao said, "In the next five years, Huawei Fertile Soil Plan 2.0 will be upgraded in five major aspects." Product upgrade: focus on building an open source computing industry ecosystem based on Kunpeng + Ascend computing processors; empowerment upgrade: build a 360-degree all-round empowerment system; alliance upgrade: promote the construction of industry standards, specifications, demonstration points, and technical certification systems to jointly expand the pie; community upgrade: build application ecosystems by industry and industry ecosystems by region; incentive upgrade: let every developer have access to Kunpeng and Ascend computing power. Under the guidance of the LEADS concept (Lab as Service, End-to-End, Agile, Dedicated, Social), for the four stages of the developer development process, namely understanding, learning, building, and listing, the corresponding processes, communities, resource allocation, etc. are optimized to enable developers to grow more efficiently on the Huawei platform. Specific support resources include: Kunpeng development prototypes, Ascend training cards, cloud service vouchers, OpenLab, training and certification services, developer competitions, ISV application migration technical support, Huawei FAE development support services, Huawei certification, ISV marketing activities and sample point support, etc. Huawei will also set up three types of funds, namely LDF (Learning and Growth Fund), PDF (Product Development Fund), and MDF (Market Development Fund), focusing on the three stages of developer learning, product construction, and product launch.

Huawei releases Kunpeng Development Kit to support developers in software migration and development on Kunpeng computing platform

Zhang Xiwei, general manager of Huawei's intelligent computing TaiShan & Atlas, said, "The development of the Kunpeng ecosystem has entered the fast lane. In the past nine months, Huawei and its partners have completed the migration of more than 3,000 industry applications to the Kunpeng ecosystem. Kunpeng enables developers to inject world-changing computing power into every line of code."

Kunpeng has adapted to the changing situation and continues to provide advanced computing support for the intelligent world, enabling various industries to accelerate digital transformation:

Kunpeng has the advantage of "end-edge-cloud computing homogeneity", breaking the boundaries between data centers, edges and terminals, and providing developers with a computing platform with a unified architecture.

Kunpeng has the computing advantages of multi-core and high concurrency, which can meet the computing power requirements of scenarios such as big data, distributed storage, and databases, and lead the trend of distributed transformation of IT architecture.

Through the synergistic advantages of Kunpeng + Ascend, we can flexibly expand to AI computing power to meet the diverse computing power needs of new technologies such as 5G, AI, and autonomous driving.

Kunpeng's five-level computing power acceleration technology achieves a 50% improvement in program performance through iterative compilation, NUMA-awareness, message queue hard acceleration, function acceleration library, and kernel scheduling self-optimization.

The Huawei Kunpeng Development Kit released at this conference includes a compiler and three tools. The industry's first analysis scanning tool and code migration tool realize automatic application migration across computing platforms, making developers insensitive to instruction set differences, accelerating application migration and achieving code optimization; the performance optimization tool is designed for developers to perform performance tuning, and helps developers improve their work efficiency by 5 times through performance visualization and one-click optimization. Developers can obtain relevant tools and knowledge bases in the Kunpeng Developer Community in one stop. At the same time, the Huawei Cloud DevCloud cloud software development platform also integrates the Kunpeng Development Kit to provide developers with online full-process software development tools.

Huawei releases ModelArts 2.0, a fully upgraded inclusive AI development platform, to improve AI development efficiency

Jia Yongli, General Manager of Huawei Cloud BU EI Service Product Department, released ModelArts 2.0, a fully upgraded one-stop AI development management platform, which upgrades the existing AI development model with extreme simplicity and automation throughout the entire process, allowing a qualitative leap in the entire chain of data preparation, model training, model management, and model reasoning. Through technological innovation, it brings a new experience to AI development. On the one hand, it greatly lowers the threshold for beginners, allowing a wider group of AI beginners and a large group of software developers to quickly master AI skills and use AI; on the other hand, it significantly improves the efficiency of professional AI developers, allowing algorithm engineers and data scientists to focus on basic core algorithm research and innovation and unleash their potential.

This conference released a professional reference book of Huawei AI series, "Ascend AI Processor Architecture and Programming - In-depth Understanding of CANN Technology Principles and Applications", for college teachers, students and developers. It was compiled by Liang Xiaoyao, professor, doctoral supervisor and discipline leader of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Shanghai Jiaotong University. Huawei will also release a series of books on intelligent computing technology as elective textbooks for students to contribute to the development of AI industry talents. Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, also attended the event and said that Linux has always been an important force in supporting the development of diverse computing. The Linux Foundation will work with Huawei to promote the development of diversity in the computing industry.

HUAWEI CONNECT 2019, Huawei's annual global flagship conference for the ICT industry, was held in Shanghai from September 18 to 20, 2019. With the theme of "Co-creating New Heights of Intelligence", this conference aims to build an open, cooperative and shared platform to discuss with customers and partners how to seize new opportunities and create an intelligent future.