Nowadays, digital technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence and virtual reality have accelerated the integration with life scenarios, and new demands and new models are emerging. Digital technology not only provides convenience for consumers, but also produces a large number of data and computing, transmission and processing needs.

A while back, the State Council issued The Development of Digital Economy in the 14th Five-Year Plan Period, pointing out that during this period (2021-2025), China's digital economy has turned to a new stage of deepening application, standardizing development and sharing benefits and the document has proposed to lay out the national hub nodes of the national integrated computing network in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, Southwest China’s Guizhou province, north China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, northwest China’s Gansu Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous region and others and speed up the implementation of the project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions.

How will "channel more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions" be carried out? What changes will it bring to the regional economy?

Promote resources mutual benefit

Compared with the "South-to-North Water Diversion Project", "project of natural gas transmission from western area to East China" and "project of transmitting the electricity from western areas to East China", people are still a little unfamiliar with "project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions".

According to insiders, "channel more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions" refers to the construction of a new computing power network system to transmit the computing power demand of the East and a large number of production and living data to the western region for storage, calculation and feedback, and establish a national computing power hub node in the western region, which will help to improve the unbalanced layout of digital infrastructure and maximize the value of data elements.

Recently, National Development and Reform Commission and others issued a notice agreeing to start the construction of National Computing hub nodes in Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu, Ningxia and other places. This means that the project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions has been started.

Jin Xiandong, spokesman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that in recent years, with the acceleration of digital transformation and upgrading of various industries, the total amount of data in the whole society has increased explosively, and the demand for data storage, computing, transmission and application has increased significantly.

"The rapid development of data center scale puts forward higher requirements for energy, land, climate and other conditions. Some eastern regions have great application demand, but energy consumption indicators are tight, power costs are high, and it is difficult and limited to develop data centers on a large scale. While some western regions are rich in renewable energy and have suitable climate, but they have small network bandwidth and high cost of inter provincial data transmission, which are unable to effectively undertake the demand of the East. Therefore, there is an urgent need to increase the top-level design of the national computing network, change the network-centered development model as soon as possible, and reconstruct the network pattern around the data center. " Jin Xiandong said.

This layout has been highly recognized by many parties. Zheng Weimin, academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Tsinghua University, said that the project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions can make full use of the vast space resources, natural resources and power resources in Western China and improve the ability of cross regional collaborative R & D and application. "Supercomputing systems are becoming more and more important to the development of the national economy, such as earthquake simulation, atmospheric simulation and quantum simulation. By connecting the computing machines in western regions such as Guizhou, Inner Mongolia and Gansu through optical fiber cables and calculating the relevant data, we can realize the overall utilization of resources." Zheng Weimin said.

"While solving the problems of tight energy consumption indicators, high power costs and limited space for the development of large-scale data centers in the eastern region, the project of  channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions can make full use of the rich renewable energy and available wasteland in the western region. In addition, the project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions can drive the vast western region to participate in the wave of intelligent guided digital economy and better release second-mover advantage so as to realize rapid development. " Liu Miao, general manager of Intelligent Cloud Service Division of Lenovo Enterprise Technology Group, said to the reporter.

Greater green development space

In the interview, the reporter found that many enterprises have begun to layout in the field of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions, and the advantages of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions are gradually emerging.

Channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions is conducive to reducing costs, energy conservation and emission reduction.

Ulanqab in Inner Mongolia is an important renewable energy development area in China, with the titles of "grassland cloud valley" and "summer capital of grassland in China". In August 2020, Alibaba cloud's super data center here began to officially provide cloud computing services. The data center uses a lot of clean energy such as wind power and photovoltaic. Meanwhile, the annual average temperature in Ulanqab is only 4.3 degrees centigrade. This means that the data center can use the natural environment for cooling for nearly 10 months a year.

Huawei also laid out here. The counterpart of Huawei's cloud strategy and planning business told reporters that Huawei Cloud's data center in Ulanqab can be used as an incubation base for innovative solutions such as big data, warm and cold storage and video transcoding, so as to improve the computing network capacity of the core site and provide customers with better data services.

"The data center is a place with high power consumption. The climate in Western China is relatively suitable, the energy is abundant and cheap, which can meet the needs of green and high-quality development of the data center. At present, we have formed two cloud data centers, one in Gui'an, Guizhou and one in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia." The counterpart said that in combination with the natural environment of Guizhou, Huawei cloud Gui'an data center adopts technologies such as AHU direct ventilation and liquid cooling to balance the load of each server and improve the resource utilization efficiency ratio. Under the condition of full load operation, the energy efficiency index PUE of the data center can be as low as 1.12. It is expected to save 1.01 billion kwh of electricity and 810,000 tons of carbon emission every year.

"Channel more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions" will also bring more opportunities for the development of digital economy.

The reporter learned from Beijing volcanic Engine Technology Co., Ltd. that the company has deployed a large number of CDN (content distribution network) nodes throughout the country in recent years. At present, the company is strengthening the talent training and recruitment of the western data center and continuously promoting the construction of the upstream and downstream industrial chain of the western data center.

"In terms of industrial digitization, ‘Channel more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions’ will help us better provide services such as cloud storage, cloud computing, data tools, R & D platform and AI technology, and help more traditional enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises make digital transformation. In terms of digital industrialization, we will further carry out key core technology innovation and actively explore new products, new models and new business formats of technology output with the help of strong digital infrastructure." The counterpart of the company said.

Optimize the regional economic pattern

What is the relationship between "data" and "computer resources" in the project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions?

Wang Qing, deputy chief engineer of the Institute of Industry and Planning of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, pointed out in an interview with reporters that computing facilities are the base of the healthy development of digital economy and play a great role in promoting the healthy development of digital economy. Some estimates show that for every 1 percentage point increase in the computing power index, the digital economy and GDP will grow by 0.33% and 0.18% respectively.

In recent years, China's digital economy has developed rapidly and accumulated a large number of valuable data resources. However, there is still a gap between the development of computing power facilities and the world-class level. At present, the computing power level is difficult to meet the huge computing demand brought by the sharp increase in the amount of data. “One of the important reasons for this is the imbalance between supply and demand in the data center carrying computing capacity. Under the background of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions, a large number of digital economy enterprises engaged in high delay businesses such as data storage and offline data analysis can realize remote computing storage resource scheduling by purchasing cloud services in the data center in the western region, effectively reducing operating costs and additional profits. At the same time, the upstream and downstream computing power industrial chain attracted by the data center places the important output value of the industrial chain in the west, which is also of great significance for the economic transformation and upgrading of the western region.” Wang Qing said.

However, Wang Qing reminded that in the process of data and information transmission, physical facilities, network security, application security, data security and information security may face multiple risks. Therefore, it is necessary to reasonably plan the security area of the network and the access rights between different areas, establish reliable network facilities, and do well in network security situation monitoring.

"At present, Lenovo has preliminarily completed the resource layout of green data centers in western regions such as Ningxia, Gansu and Inner Mongolia. We also actively layout in hot cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Shenzhen, cutting into the fields of edge computing, cross-border finance, artificial intelligence and so on." Liu Miao said that in the future, Lenovo will actively participate in the project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions from the multidimensional aspects of computing resource services, data circulation integration and data security protection.

The technical director of Huawei's optical product line said that the application scenario of computing power network is mainly related to the digital transformation of the government, state-owned enterprises and industries, which has high requirements for the security, reliability and certainty experience of computing power and network. In the future, it is necessary to carry the load bearing and upgrade according to different requirements such as delay, bandwidth and security isolation. The counterpart disclosed that the enterprise will try all-optical transmission network to carry the data transmission of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions, so as to further improve the security and efficiency.

The project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions has attracted investment enthusiasm from many places in the West. Huang Hao, a researcher at the Institute of Financial Strategy of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told reporters that accelerating the implementation of the project of channeling more computing resources from the eastern areas to the less developed western regions and cultivating new growth points of industries in the western region in the future will be conducive to giving full play to the advantages of local resources throughout the country. However, in this process, we should pay attention to market orientation and demand orientation in terms of what to invest, how much to invest and how to invest, so as to quickly form cross regional data interaction ability and avoid ineffective investment.