On December 29, eSurfing Digital Technology Ecosystem Conference 2022 was inaugurated on the cloud. During the conference, Shao Guanglu, President of China Telecom, released four scientific and technological innovations, namely, eSurfing Cloud White Paper, eSurfing Cloud Zijin DPU, Xinghe AI Platform and eight industry digital platforms in the field of industry digitalization, which fully demonstrated China Telecom's new practice in comprehensively and deeply implementing the strategy of Cloudification & Digital Transformation and pushing forward the industrial digitalized services including Rong Cloud, Rong Security, Rong AI and Rong Digital Platform that have formed the new drive to accelerate the business growth, as well as its new vision in promoting the high-quality development of digital economy.

Key Achievement 1: eSurfing Cloud White Paper

"Build the cloud-network resources into a national information infrastructure that is as ubiquitous, ordered as per use and accessible as water and power resources, and create a cloud with intelligent and ubiquitous resources, products and services." This is a vivid analogy Shao Guanglu made when referring to eSurfing Cloud 6.0.

In his view, cloud computing has currently become the core platform serving the digital transformation of the entire society. China Telecom has been building clouds for ten years, fulfilling the policy of "network as the foundation, cloud as the core, network following the cloud, and cloud-network integration”. It continues to lead the domestic GovCloud market, ranking among the top players in China's public cloud market. At present, it could not have been better timed to elaborate the development vision, development goals, evolution path and key measures of eSurfing Cloud by releasing eSurfing Cloud White Paper.

The development vision and mission of eSurfing Cloud in the eSurfing Cloud White Paper are planned as follows: In view of the core requirements of the Party, government and military sectors,  state-owned central enterprises and key industries, eSurfing Cloud is determined to make breakthrough in the key core technologies of cloud-network integration, strengthen the collaborative capabilities of Cloud-Network-Edge-Terminal, create a cloud that has six significant features, namely, scientific and technological innovation, independence & controllability, security & trustworthiness, cloud-network integration, open ecosystem, and green & low-carbon, and strive to become "China's first and world leading" trusted carrier platform for national critical information services. The White Paper also highlighted the development target by 2030 that "eSurfing is determined to grow into a leader of domestic high-end cloud computing brands and become a national card for China to go global".

eSurfing Cloud’s confidence originates from a series of achievements in scientific and technological innovation, and independence and controllability.

In terms of scientific and technological innovation, customized CPUs and servers, self-developed high-density white-box switches and smart NICs have greatly improved storage and network performance and simplified device management and maintenance; a new generation of cloud platform has been developed to fully upgrade the computing, storage and networking capabilities; RDS, storage and computing separation, multi-core native isomorphic and other technologies have been developed, with breakthroughs in elasticity, scalability, RTO, perception and other indicators; CDN has been integrated with edge computing, a CDN technology system has been built based on cloud native architecture, and scheduling is leading in the industry for its accuracy; and the industry's first diversified cloud terminal hybrid bearer platform has been launched, the cloud streaming protocols have been independently developed, and cloud terminal products have been leading in the industry.

In terms of independence and controllability, eSurfing Cloud has independently developed the core components of the cloud base, replacing a large number of open source software such as OpenStack, and realizing a series of independent and controllable core technologies including the server operating system, the software and hardware collaborative hyperscale cloud platform, CDN, big video, etc.; and by adapting to the heterogeneous and diversified basic software and hardware, eSurfing Cloud has created a full-stack independent and controllable cloud.

In terms of security and trustworthiness, an integrated defense-in-depth system with four-level linkage, namely backbone network, IDC, resource pool and virtual network, has been built through the collaboration of cloud, network, edge and terminal; and 66 resource pools of eSurfing Cloud have passed 5-star trusted cloud service certification by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the cloud service security assessment by Cyberspace Administration of China, with its cloud compliance capability ranking among the top players of the industry.

In terms of cloud-network integration, China Telecom has completed the infrastructure layout system of 2+4+31+X+O, and achieved direct access between the optical layers and IP layers of eight hubs, realizing latency in milliseconds among multiple AZs within the same region; Through the combination of multi-cloud and multi-network, the intelligent and inclusive cloud-network services have been initially built based on the cloud-network infrastructure, cloud-network and industry data, and intelligent algorithms.

Shao Guanglu said in his speech that eSurfing Cloud made clear the development milestones of the following two phases. The first is eSurfing Cloud 5.0 phase from 2023 to 2027, i.e. the phase of Cloud-Network-Edge-Terminal integration; and the second is eSurfing Cloud 6.0 phase from 2028 to 2030, i.e. the phase of intelligent ubiquitous cloud.

“With the aim of openness and mutual benefits, eSurfing Cloud has established business links with customers and upstream and downstream partners of the industry by joining various partners in the whole industry chain and focusing on technology research and development, application innovation, channel expansion and implementation and delivery.” Shao Guanglu introduced, “China Telecom will focus on the opening and enablement of underlying software and hardware platforms in the future, create scenario-based solutions jointly with hardware, chips, terminals and software vendors; establish joint innovation labs together with domestic universities and research institutes; and open up the capability of eSurfing Cloud, establish the eSurfing Cloud Application Ecosystem Partnership Benefit System, and build the eSurfing Cloud Open Lab, thus to realize the technology symbiosis and win-win business for eSurfing Cloud.

Key Achievement 2: eSurfing Cloud Zijin DPU

Just as the electricity that drives machines is the foundation of the industrial economy, the cloud that carries data storage and computing is the foundation of the digital economy. As a new productive force in the era of digital economy, computing power has become the core kinetic energy and solid foundation to promote the development of digital economy. However, the traditional CPU-centric computing architecture can no longer meet the needs of new business scenarios for the computing performance is facing new challenges.

Shao Guanglu said in his speech that in order to tackle the current problems, eSurfing Cloud has independently developed a new generation of cloud computing architecture based on Zijin DPU to accelerate the cloudification of computing, network, storage and other computing power resources, which is characterized by high performance, low latency, high reliability, and large-scale deployment. Based on eSurfing Cloud's fully independent R&D capability, three major technological breakthroughs have been made, namely, virtualized full dismount, multi-service hardware acceleration, and self-developed high-performance network protocols.

By virtue of the above breakthroughs, compared with the traditional CPU computing power architecture, eSurfing Cloud Zijin DPU computing power architecture has the following three advantages:

First, Zijin DPU has achieved zero loss of server virtualization to fully release computing power. Not only has the sales performance of ECS been improved, but also the elastic BMS has been supported to reduce costs and increase efficiency, so as to benefit all customers.

Second, Zijin DPU has higher performance and lower latency. Compared with the traditional CPU relying purely on software, Zijin DPU has doubled its network PPS performance through chip-level hardware acceleration; The storage IOPS performance has been doubled, and the network latency has been reduced to a quarter of the original. The overall performance of the new architecture has been significantly improved, resulting in a better product experience for customers.

Third, Zijin DPU supports one cloud with multiple chips and plug-and-play. Zijin DPU has realized physical isolation between server CPU environment and virtualized environment, and plug-and-play is applied to servers with different CPU chip architectures.

Key Achievement 3: Xinghe AI Platform

In the process of AI industrialization, algorithms, computing power and data serve as the troika that drives AI’s scale development. A leap from weak AI to strong AI requires the troika to release greater potential and stronger impetus.

During this Conference, China Telecom launched the Xinghe AI Platform to conform to the trend of the times and the needs of industrial development. Xinghe AI Platform is the world's first AI product and capability platform based on cloud-network integration and equipped with four-level computing power from network, region, edge to terminal.

Shao Guanglu pointed out that Xinghe Platform has demonstrated strong capabilities in computing power, PaaS, application, data processing and ecosystem cooperation. In terms of computing power, as the base of middleground resources in AI PaaS, Xinghe has deployed tens of thousands of GPU cards supporting unified scheduling all over the country; in the aspect of PaaS, Xinghe is based on a unified AI-PaaS component, which can adapt to 8 mainstream GPUs at home and abroad, and provides a unified forward reasoning framework, thus realizing convenient and efficient algorithm loading; In terms of application, Xinghe will serve as a unified algorithm repository of China Telecom to support one-stop adding of its own and ecosystem partners' algorithms,  orchestration of algorithms and real-time scheduling and parameter adjustment by different time periods, grades and regions, thus to significantly improve the delivery efficiency of AI applications; In terms of data processing, Xinghe provides a unified data pre-processing paradigm to realize flexible resource subscription and unified data management; In the aspect of AI ecosystem building, OEM hardware ecosystem for suppliers, ISV  software ecosystem for application integrators and AS ecosystem for channel dealers have been established to promote the cooperation of upstream and downstream industries to jointly build a prosperous AI industrial ecosystem.

Shao Guanglu emphasized two key technological breakthroughs made in the process of enablement on Xinghe Platform.

First, by means of the preloading of algorithm capabilities, help reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve performance for algorithm training.  In order to solve the puzzles of AI scale development recognized by the industry, such as the training accuracy of long-tail scenarios and the difficulty of obtaining small samples, China Telecom Xinghe AI Platform and Pujiang Lab jointly developed the industry's first general foundation model for real business of urban governance - "Xinghe" general visual model. The foundation model adopts a multi-granularity self-monitoring learning mechanism, which shortens the training cycle and reduces R&D investment by more than 70%. Meanwhile, the foundation model has strong capabilities in task generalization and efficient small sample migration to empower the downstream task algorithm. The required sample size can be reduced by 90%, and in some downstream tasks, the performance effect exceeds that of the special model by more than 10%. China Telecom will open up the interface of the urban governance foundation model to the ecosystem partners, and successively launch the foundation models for various fields including smart industry, so as to diversify the algorithm preloading capabilities of the platform.

Second, pool massive data and load scenarios to empower thousands of industries. At present, the platform has formed an end-to-end platform empowering system featuring "data integration, capability aggregation, unified architecture and open ecosystem", which realizes deep integration of cloud-network, computing power and platform, supports public cloud with four-level computing power and private deployment, and adapts to different business scenarios of various customers. Relying on four-level computing power and various algorithms, and in collaboration with more than 100 industry partners, Xinghe AI Platform has brought together a large number of scenario-based comprehensive information solutions in aspects of smart cities, social governance, industrial quality inspection, bright and clear kitchen and stove, and intelligent customer services, and has supported the landing of more than 500 industry digital projects.

When referring to the prospect of Xinghe Platform, Shao Guanglu said that based on the overall capabilities of Xinghe Platform and the key technology breakthroughs, China Telecom will constantly upgrade the capabilities of Xinghe AI Platform and work together with various partners to jointly provide various industries with digital products and services based on Rong Cloud, Rong Security, Rong AI and Rong Platform.

Key Achievement 4: Eight industrial digital platforms in the field of industry digitalization

In order to meet the requirements of industrial digital transformation and upgrading and give full play to cloud-network integration, in 2022, China Telecom, in collaboration with industrial partners in the field of industry digitalization and in view of the broad market prospect, built a series of industrial digital platforms that meet the needs of customers for informatization and integrate the core technologies of cloud, network, digitalization, intelligence and security.

When releasing the digital platforms of eight key industries, Shao Guanglu pointed out that the platforms released this time cover three major areas: social governance, real economy and people's livelihood. The first category includes three platforms, namely digital government, social governance, and urban operation, management and services, which aims to digitally empower new governance. The second category includes two platforms, namely transportation digital brain and industrial Internet public service for parks, which aims to offer digital assistance to new industries. The third category includes three platforms, namely infectious disease monitoring, early warning and emergency command, teaching video cloud, and global tourism, which aims to digitally improve people's livelihood.

In Zhejiang, through the digital management of urban operation safety, the integrated monitoring of 172,900km drainage pipelines and 34,100km urban roads within the province has been achieved, which strengthens the urban risk prevention and control capabilities and improve the management towards fineness and intelligence.

In Jiangsu, Suzhou Industrial Park's Suliantong, a digital industrial chain connection platform, provided tens of thousands of links between supply and demand for enterprises in the park during the pandemic, contributing to the smooth and stable operation of the regional economy.

In Sichuan, a cloud-based education platform was built to realize remote live streaming teaching and interactivity, helping achieve balanced coverage of educational resources and supporting the high-quality development of national education digitization strategy.

In Hunan, the Zhangjiajie "Global Tourism" project was launched, realizing 100-million-level data integration and application, which delivers tourists with more scientific experience and enables enterprises to operate more efficiently.

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China Telecom will continue to dive in and expand the industrial digital platforms, promote integration and innovation, improve the digital management level of industrial authorities, increase the production efficiency of industrial customers, release the high-quality development impetus, accelerate the replication of industrial digital achievements, and empower the digital transformation of thousands of industries.

"The digital economy has broad and promising prospects.” Shao Guanglu said, “China Telecom will firmly fulfill its mission of building a strong cyber power and a digital China and maintaining the cyber security, adhere to taking high-quality development as the theme, digital transformation as the main line, and reform, opening-up and innovation as the driving force, fully and deeply implement the strategy of Cloudification & Digital Transformation, quicken the pace to a world-class enterprise, and play a big part and make new breakthroughs in pushing forward high-quality development of the digital economy.