China continues to expand its digital economy, which the government considers a key part of the country's future development. By kicking off the construction of eight national computing hubs and building ten national-data center clusters, China plans to form a new type of computing power network to boost the digital economy. 

The eight national computing hubs will be built in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, north China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region, southwest China's Guizhou Province, northwest China's Gansu Province and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.

As a key link between China's existing data center clusters, the National Supercomputing Center in Changsha is home to the Tianhe supercomputer which began operations in 2011 to offer various computing services for the country. Now, it's expected to play a key role in China's latest strategic digital project.

"Our center is in central-southern China, bridging the more prosperous eastern areas and the west. It is vital for us to connect both regions, coordinating the 'east-to-west computing resource transfer' project. Also, we have users who generate data and computing centers that digest data. The center is making efforts to link these users, clusters, and data for better resource relocation," said Peng Shaoliang, director at National Supercomputing Center in Changsha.

According to China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the mega project aims to "send data gathered from the more prosperous eastern regions of China to the less developed, but resource-rich western regions for storage, calculation, and feedback, and establish national computing hubs in western China." 

"The country's digital economy will enter a new stage. The transfer work would help China enhance its imbalance in the design of layout of digital infrastructure and maximize the value of the production factor of data. Hot data produced by industries of finance, climate forecasting, biomedicine could be processed by eastern centers, while cold data, like the training dataset, can be transferred to the west. The efficiency will be hugely enhanced," said Peng.

The center has developed a series of applications in artificial intelligence, geographic studies, medicine, bioengineering, smart cities, and finance, with China's most complete computing industrial ecosystem from hardware research and development to software services.

Under the mega project, the system is upgrading to integrate AI and high-performance computing within the supercomputing system.

"By applying diverse functions, we can offer AI, cloud computing, and data processing services to 3,000 clients to boost their digital transformation. So they no longer need to find different data centers to do the work, we can offer one-station solutions," said Huang Huang, senior engineer at National Supercomputing Center.

The 14th Five-Year Plan period rolled out by China's State Council said China will focus on accelerating the implementation of its east-to-west computing resource transfer project during the country's 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), given the digital economy will enter a new development stage featuring further application, standardized development, and inclusive sharing.

(Cover: The main building of National Supercomputing Center in Changsha. /photo via National Supercomputing Center in Changsha)