Guizhou's super computational power enables the audience to watch the Wandering Earth II ten years in advance

GUIYANG, China, March 18, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- A news report by Huanqiu.com: Shortly after 9:00 a.m., a conference room in the data center was packed with attendees. Zhang Xian, the project manager of the Engineering Construction Department at China Mobile (Guizhou) Big Data Center, began to discuss a joint design review.

The proposed project is China Mobile (Guizhou) Big Data Center Phase III expected to have an installed capacity of more than 7,000 racks, which is scheduled for completion in 2024.

From 2014 to 2019, China Mobile (Guizhou) Big Data Center Phase I and II in Gui'an New Area were completed and put into operation. "Phase II was supposed to take two years to complete, but it was completed in one year, due to the increasing demand for big data application scenarios and data." Zhang Xian said.

In 2021, the construction of a national (Guizhou) hub node for the development of China's integrated computational power network was approved in Guizhou, becoming an important computational power base of the national "Eastern Digital and Western Computing" project, which then turns into a new target for developing the digital economy in Guizhou.

"The Guizhou hub will be centered around Gui'an, which also represents a substantial opportunity for Gui'an. It is a glorious mission and weighty responsibility," said Ma Ningyu, Mayor of Guiyang and Director of Gui'an New Area Management Committee.

"From the perspective of computational power development, it's fair to say that Gui'an is the ideal location," he added.

Featured with a wide distribution of karst landscapes, Guizhou has a stable geological structure, abundant hydroenergy and coal resources. More importantly, the annual average temperature in Guizhou is only 14-16℃, which is suitable for reducing the energy consumption of data centers.

At present, Guizhou is accelerating the building of its first national big data comprehensive pilot zone and digital economy development innovation zone. This initiative has led to the construction and operation of 37 key data centers. Up to now, there are 18 large and ultra-large data centers in Guizhou, including eight ultra-large ones. That makes Guizhou one of the regions with the largest concentration of large and ultra-large data centers in the world. Guizhou's server carrying capacity has reached 2.25 million units, with an average on-shelf rate of 56.5 percent. This capacity enables the province to be directly connected to the backbone network of 16 provinces and 32 cities across the country.

Data centers play a crucial role in improving the overall computational power level. In the case of post-production and rendering of movies, they provide the necessary computational support. The Gui'an Supercomputing Center participated in the post-production and rendering of movies scheduled for the 2023 Spring Festival, such as The Wandering Earth II, Deep Sea, and Boonie Bears: Guardian Code.

Among them, The Wandering Earth II is regarded as a milestone in China's history of science fiction film, and the rendering computational power output from Gui'an Supercomputing Center reached an impressive 30 percent.

"In The Wandering Earth II, there are many space infrastructure and fighter jet pictures that were rendered with great precision using a lot of computational power. The supercomputing center took seven or eight hours to render every frame. The 24h real-time rendering greatly enhanced the film's visual splendor. Without the help of the supercomputing center, it would take 10 years to produce the film from rendering to release," stated Peng Benqian, the deputy director of the Technology R&D Department of Gui'an New Area Science & Technology Innovation Industry Development Co., Ltd.

Statistics show that in 2022, the Gui'an Supercomputing Center provided cloud-rendering computational power support for more than 200,000 users across more than 50 countries and regions. The center participated in the rendering of about 50 film and TV productions, totaling approximately 69 million hours long, including Three-Body, New Gods: Yang Jian and Ordinary Hero. The average server utilization rate basically reached over 80 percent, contributing to about 6.381 billion box office and about 115 billion views.

According to Ma Ningyu, Gui'an is accelerating the formation of a collaborative innovation system that integrates "cloud, computing, data and network" resources, with computational power as the core productivity and data as the core factor of production, to build a national computational power support base and national data element circulation hub.

In the afternoon, Zhang Xian also discussed with his colleagues some details of the request for proposal and preparation of technical specifications. "After the construction starts, I will spend most of my time working on the site, monitoring the process and quality, solving problems right on the spot, and reviewing construction progress at the end of each day," said Zhang Xian.

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