(JW Insights) Apr 18 -- China's Science and Technology Ministry (MOST) initiated the establishment of a national supercomputing internet consortium to promote the construction of a computing power base through the integrated operation of supercomputing power, reported Yicai Global on April 18. The move comes amid the development of generative artificial intelligence.

By 2025, the consortium will form an overall layout with advanced technologies, innovative models, premium services, and an all-around ecosystem, MOST said at the initiation event held in Tianjin on April 17.

Supercomputing internet is to operate supercomputing centers via the internet of thinking and connect all supercomputing centers nationwide through a computing power network to build an integrated computing power services platform.

Guo Liang, deputy chief engineer at the Cloud Computing and Big Data Research Institute under the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), told Yicai Global that China should speed up its transformation to better meet the new development pattern through a single supercomputing center with ultra-strong computing power.

Interconnecting supercomputing centers and building national integrated supercomputing infrastructures are necessary to deal with mass computing needs, and cultivating an industrial ecosystem and exploring business modes are crucial for integrated computing power platforms to provide computing power services, Guo added.

China's computing power industry was worth RMB2.6 trillion ($378.5 billion) in 2021, bringing direct and indirect economic outputs of RMB2.2 trillion ($320 billion) and RMB8.2 trillion ($1.19 trillion), respectively.

As core forces advancing the development of the digital economy, global data volume and computing power continue their high-speed growth. Every RMB1 ($15 cents) spent on computing power brings between RMB3 ($44 cents) and RMB4 ($58 cents)in economic output, according to estimations from the CAICT.

Digital infrastructures and services platforms have been developed quicker in recent years. China's general computing power quadrupled between 2016 and 2020, with an almost 10,000 percent gain in smart computing power over the period, data from CAICT showed.

Xu Feng from the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China noted, "China leads the US by the number of supercomputing centers but still lags behind the US by computing infrastructure, meaning it still needs more high-quality data centers," said the Yicai Global report.

(Chen HX)