At an event, “2020 Global Storage Professors Forum,” Huawei announced the OlympusMons Award 2021 and also invited scientists to tackle the two most challenging problems in the field of data storage. The announcement was attended by over one hundred storage experts from Huawei, the Chinese Academy of Engineering, universities, and research institutes local and abroad.
The opening speech titled, “Mounting the Olympus Mons and Tackling Data Challenges” was delivered by William Xu, member of Huawei’s Board of Directors and Director of Huawei’s Institute of Strategic Research.
It 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 major challenges and commercialise scientific achievements, Huawei and researchers learn from each other and grow together.” At the Annual Conference held in Changsha in August 2020, Huawei announced “Ten Mathematics Challenges in the Post-Shannon Era,” two of which pertain to data storage, namely, “Efficient Erasure Coding” and “Approximate Computing of Ultra-Large-Scale Data.”
The researches taking place for the next-generation storage are directed toward innovation of media, network, architecture, and management. To fulfill the same purpose, Huawei has established five labs: the Intelligent Storage Innovation Lab, Data Fabric Innovation Lab, Memory Storage Innovation Lab, Data Reduction Innovation Lab, and Video Storage Innovation Lab. These labs will create opportunities for over 4,000 storage scientists in Huawei, helping them leverage the latest emerging 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 as 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 Computer Science Professor at Tsinghua University, in his speech themed “TStor Storage System and MadFS File System.”
The rising prominence of enterprise digital transformation, big data, cloud, 5G, and AI (artificial intelligence) is encouraging the rapid development of applications including virtualization, high-performance computing, AI, and AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality), which demands better and more intelligent storage.
Opportunities for subversive new technologies hide in root technologies such as diversified computing power, new media, high-performance networks, and intelligent data reduction algorithms. Besides, it remains a significant challenge to streamline the application ecosystem, switch on the underlying root technologies while building new data storage architecture to the on-point cost, and unlock the power of mass.
Huawei has announced an attractive award, namely, the OlympusMons Award 2021, to encourage and reward scientists for addressing the challenge of building a storage system with optimum cost and bringing a significant change in next-generation root storage technologies.
The ultimate aim of giving away this award is to enable Huawei to work with better data storage systems with respect to cloud-oriented, multi-cloud storage services, data-centric, new data application storage systems, and groundbreaking system architecture.
