Alibaba Cloud Releases Dedicated Processor for Cloud Data Center
At the 2022 Alibaba Cloud Summit held on June 13, Alibaba Cloud released the cloud data center dedicated processor CIPU. "If we define the next generation cloud, China's cloud computing has a chance to overtake." Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Business Group, said that compared with traditional architecture, the CIPU released this time can reduce the loss of computing power virtualization to zero, and make access to the cloud faster than access to local hard disks. CIPU will replace CPU as the processing core of the data center in the cloud era.
Experts said that currently cloud computing has entered a critical breakthrough period, and Intel, Nvidia and other manufacturers have launched IPU and DPU technologies.
Defining the Next Generation Cloud
Zhang Jianfeng said that cloud computing technology has gone through two stages of development in the past decade. The first stage is to replace mainframe and minicomputer with distributed and virtualized technologies to meet the demand for computing flexibility brought by business expansion of enterprises at that time; The second stage is the resource pooling technology, which separates computing and storage resources, and then arranges and schedules them in a large-scale manner to provide a large-scale computing and storage resource pool. The two stages of technology evolution are optimized based on the traditional CPU centric architecture, which has reached the bottleneck.
In recent years, the demands of cloud customers have changed greatly. More and more data intensive computing and higher requirements for low latency, high bandwidth and so on have made it difficult for traditional architectures to meet these demands. "Cloud computing has entered a new stage of development." Zhang Jianfeng said that the new generation of cloud computing needs systematic innovation from within the data center, from a CPU centric architecture to a CIPU centric architecture. CIPU will replace CPU as the processing core of IDC in the cloud era.
It is reported that CIPU is a new architecture system, which accesses physical computing, storage, and network resources downward, and quickly cloud and accelerate hardware; Access the Apsara Cloud operating system upward, manage and control millions of Alibaba Cloud servers worldwide, reduce the loss of computing virtualization to zero, and make access to the cloud faster than access to local hard disks through large-scale application of RDMA network technology. "Now is the window period to redefine the cloud. If we define the next generation cloud, China's cloud computing will have the opportunity to overtake," said Zhang Jianfeng.
At present, cloud computing has entered a critical breakthrough period. "In recent years, China's innovation in cloud computing mainly focuses on the software level." Zheng Weimin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that CIPU technology can break the previous generation of computing architecture.
Insist on self research of technology
Alibaba Cloud insists on technological innovation, successfully developed its own cloud operating system Feitian, and built a new computing architecture integrating hardware and software.
According to Alibaba Cloud, the Apsara operating system is fully compatible with X86, ARM, RISC-V and other chip architectures to achieve "one cloud with multiple cores". At present, Alibaba Cloud is the cloud vendor that supports the most CPU types in the world.
For the large-scale and high concurrency characteristics of cloud computing, Alibaba Cloud has previously released the CPU chip Reliance 710. At present, Yitian 710 has been deployed on a large scale in Alibaba Cloud data centers. In addition, Alibaba Cloud has released the Panjiu server and the Dragon Dragon operating system. Panjiu server adopts modular design, which can realize the separation of computing and storage, including high-performance computing series, high-capacity storage series, high-performance storage series, etc., and has different cooling modes such as air cooling and liquid cooling.
R&D investment is an important indicator to measure enterprise innovation. Xu Hong, chief financial officer of Alibaba Group, revealed on the recent financial report conference that Alibaba has invested more than 120 billion yuan in R&D in the past year.
At present, Alibaba has set up 7 research centers around the world, with more than 16 underlying technology fields, more than 3000 open source technology projects to the whole society, and more than 10000 global invention patents in strategic emerging industries, mainly in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, chip and other fields.
Large market scale
"Cloud" is an important way for enterprises to achieve digital transformation. Jiang Linquan, head of Alibaba Cloud virtualization technology, said in an interview that the core of cloud computing technology is an "industrial revolution", allowing small and medium-sized enterprises to use IT technology at a low cost. "99% of SMEs have no ability to build their own distributed systems. Cloud computing provides the possibility of how to quickly realize digital transformation and digital transformation of enterprises."
In the first quarter, China's cloud computing market grew. According to the data released by Canalys, a research institution, the overall size of China's cloud infrastructure service market reached US $7.3 billion in the first quarter of this year, up 21% year on year. Alibaba Cloud, Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Baidu Cloud ranked first in market share. Among them, the market share of Alibaba Cloud is 36.7%, and that of Huawei Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Baidu Cloud are 18.0%, 15.7% and 8.4% respectively.
According to the financial report, Alibaba Cloud achieved annual EBITA profit for the first time in fiscal year 2022, significantly improving from a loss of 2.251 billion yuan in the previous fiscal year to a profit of 1.146 billion yuan. In terms of users, AliCloud has more than 4 million paying customers.
