Middle East, January 3, 2021: At the 2020 Global Storage Professors Forum, Huawei announced the OlympusMons Award 2021 and invited global scientists to tackle the two most difficult problems in data storage. Over one hundred storage experts from Huawei, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and top universities and research institutes home and abroad witnessed the announcement.
Innovative Data Storage Paves the Way to a Digital Future
William Xu, member of Huawei’s Board of Directors and director of Huawei’s Institute of Strategic Research, opened the forum with a speech titled “Mounting the Olympus Mons and Tackling Data Challenges.” He said, “Innovation is in Huawei’s blood. We strive to excel, to lead, to innovate, and to put in life scientists’ research outcomes. By working to overcome prominent challenges and commercialise scientific achievements, Huawei and researchers learn from each other and grow together.” At the Annual Conference on Applied Mathematics and Interdisciplinary Science held in Changsha in this August, Huawei announced the “Ten Mathematics Challenges in the Post-Shannon Era”, two of which pertain to data storage: “Efficient Erasure Coding” and “Approximate Computing of Ultra-Large-Scale Data”.
Researches on the next-generation storage are directed towards systematic innovation of media, network, architecture, and management. To this end, Huawei has established five labs: the Data Fabric Innovation Lab, Intelligent Storage Innovation Lab, Memory Storage Innovation Lab, Data Reduction Innovation Lab, and Video Storage Innovation Lab. The labs will fully unleash the potential of over 4,000 storage scientists in Huawei, enabling them to leverage the latest technologies to push storage efficiency to new limits.
“The giant system of information consists of three parts: compute, network, and storage. Compute and storage have had enough attention in the past two decades, and good days have finally come for storage today, when storage is regarded the center of the system. As the foundation for computing, storage is essential to our national plan for new infrastructure.” said Zheng Weimin, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor of computer science at Tsinghua University, in his speech themed “TStor Storage System and MadFS File System”.
While TStor features solid reliability, self-maintainability and uses a large-scale erasure coding algorithm, MadFS is a high-performing cache file system.
Taming the Storage Olympus Mons
The popularity of enterprise digital transformation, cloud, big data, 5G, and AI promotes the rapid development of applications such as core transaction, virtualisation, high-performance computing, AI, and AR/VR, which in turn demand larger, faster, and more intelligent storage.
Opportunities for subversive new technologies hide in root technologies like diversified computing power, new media, high-performance networks, and intelligent data reduction algorithms. In addition, it remains a huge challenge to streamline the application ecosystem, enable underlying root technologies, and build a new data storage architecture to optimise storage cost-efficiency and unlock the power of mass data.
Therefore, Huawei has set an attractive award, namely the OlympusMons Award 2021, to encourage scientists around the world to tackle the challenge of building a storage system with ultimate cost-efficiency and making breakthroughs in next-generation root storage technologies. In providing such an award, Huawei hopes to work with researchers to build a better data storage system in terms of cloud-oriented, multi-cloud storage services, data-centric, new data application storage systems, AI-driven storage software architecture, and ground-breaking system architecture.
