Elastic Cloud New Computing Power Drives Immersive New Interaction

The digitalization of financial enterprises is the only way for enterprises to continuously upgrade their business and build their core competitiveness, which has become the consensus of most financial enterprises. As the infrastructure and application platform of cloud, public cloud provides a strong foundation for the digitalization of financial enterprises.

At the same time, with the intensification of competition in the business environment and the birth of new interactive methods, the IT system in the financial industry is also making continuous progress. On August 25-26, 2022, Alibaba Cloud held the Financial Innovation Summit to discuss the new IT paradigm and new interaction model in the future with the pioneers in the financial industry.

Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing team attended and shared as a representative of computing power base and underlying hard core technology; In the exhibition area, we showed immersive applications deployed on the Alibaba Cloud XR platform with partners.

Four challenges facing the digitalization of financial industry

From the perspective of cloud technology, the current digitalization of the financial industry faces four new challenges:

1. Safe processing of data: data is the core asset, including transaction data, user data, monitoring, log, etc., which is the basis of business innovation. With the increasing scale of data, more powerful data processing capabilities are needed to enable enterprises to gain business insights from data and drive intelligent management and decision-making; At the same time, a more secure data processing environment is needed to ensure the safety and compliance of assets.

2. Smooth upgrading of IT system: the digitalization of financial enterprises should be organically combined with the existing IT system, rather than simply starting from scratch. This requires that cloud services have the ability to deploy flexibly, including in the customer's data center, to meet the enterprise's requirements for data compliance, network latency, and so on.

3. Safe and efficient office work: employees are the core competitiveness and the driving force of business innovation. Financial enterprises need a more efficient and secure cloud office platform, and deploy the office system and production system on the cloud, so as to realize the complete closed-loop of enterprise digitalization.

4. Transformation of interaction form: With the deepening of digitalization, the interaction mode between financial institutions and their users has also changed. For example, banks and securities companies used to serve users through offline counters, but now they have online graphic and video interaction. All these need the support of rich ecology. Financial enterprises need to rely on cloud computing to achieve faster, flexible and efficient digitalization, and also need to use various enterprise software to achieve cloudization, with the ability of rapid deployment and efficient operation and maintenance.

Safe, reliable and high-performance computing power: Yitian x Shenlong

Alibaba researcher, Alibaba Cloud elastic computing&shadowless product line leader

Zhang Xiantao

Zhang Xiantao, a researcher at Alibaba and head of Alibaba Cloud's elastic computing&shadowless product line, said that in response to the challenges posed by the rapid growth of financial customer data, Alibaba Cloud's new generation of cloud server ECS, relying on the new generation of CIPU technology and the fourth generation of DPCA architecture, has made leapfrog upgrades in computing, network, storage and security. The overall computing power has increased by 40%, and the network bandwidth will be fully upgraded to 2 * 100Gb, The maximum IOPS of cloud disk is 3 million, enabling financial enterprises to cope with various data-intensive scenarios such as quantitative transactions.

At the same time, Alibaba Cloud self-developed the fourth generation DPCA architecture to achieve the industry's first large-scale RDMA acceleration technology on the cloud. The network PPS reached 50 million, and the network latency was at least 5 microseconds, which again refreshed the industry's highest level. Based on the leading basic performance, the fourth generation of DPCA will further improve the performance of database, AI, big data and other common applications.

With the support of DPCA's architecture, Alibaba Cloud's new generation of enterprise-level instance g8m, which is equipped with the Yitian 710 chip, is being tested. Yitian 710 chip is designed for the high concurrency, high performance and high energy efficiency requirements of cloud scenarios. Its performance exceeds the industry benchmark by 20%, and the energy efficiency ratio increases by more than 50%; In computationally intensive scenarios such as AI reasoning, live audio and video on demand, the cost performance of g8m instances will significantly exceed the industry level.

At present, Alibaba Cloud is the first cloud manufacturer in the industry that ECS is equipped with both trusted computing and encrypted computing. Combining with Alibaba Cloud's native security capabilities, Alibaba Cloud provides comprehensive security three-dimensional protection to meet the security and trust needs of financial customers.

Ubiquitous computing power: on-demand deployment

The trend of financial enterprises to cloud is becoming more and more obvious, but financial enterprises often have specific requirements for cluster deployment. In addition to the financial cloud, we also added the product form of "financial exclusive zone". In the financial cloud, financial enterprises are provided with exclusive clusters that meet customer expectations and regulatory requirements, and are isolated from other clusters to achieve the use of computing, storage, databases and other public cloud products in controllable areas. At the same time, it meets the diversified needs of users through strategies such as one cloud and multiple cores.

Today, in order to meet the rich deployment needs of users, Alibaba Cloud has formed multiple forms of public cloud, including local regions, exclusive regions, and on-site computing nodes "cloud boxes", so that computing power is everywhere.

The local region is the extension of the central region to the economically active region, providing local enterprises and institutions with nearby cloud services; The exclusive region is built in the form of public cloud, which is rented and built on behalf of others. It is built for enterprises with IDC or demand for data location and product richness, and the product capabilities of public cloud are deployed at the location designated by customers; Cloud box, a localized cloud infrastructure delivered to the client's computer room in the form of a cabinet, realizes data localization, and improves data security and compliance in combination with the form of single-tenant cloud products. The above are all public cloud forms, providing a unified development interface, and Alibaba Cloud is responsible for the operation, maintenance and upgrading of products.

Cloud computing power: safe office

At the level of office safety and efficiency, we found that the following pain points have not been well solved in the financial industry office scene:

1. The comprehensive cost of computer installation and maintenance in a large number of branches and different office locations is high;

2. Ordinary computers have less security control, especially the ability to control the behavior of end-users on the opposite side is weak;

3. Local computer, hardware failure or application error in the computer, complex maintenance, requiring special personnel to come to the site, time-consuming and labor-intensive;

4. It is difficult to work at home during the epidemic, and remote login is either without network or insecure.

The shadowless security office solution can well solve the above problems. Invisible has a wide range of applications in the financial industry. The Invisible financial cloud version has passed the level 4 certification of equal insurance, meeting the financial regulatory requirements of the Bank of China and the Board of Directors, and is safe and compliant, so as to better ensure the security of financial core data assets. Take China Property and Casualty Insurance as an example, the traditional model often encounters the risk of data leakage, extensive access to the intranet, and the personalized environment of personal computer brings many challenges to operation and maintenance. After the use of Invisible, the data will not fall to the ground, avoiding active or passive data leakage to the greatest extent. The problem of network authority control is solved through account secret+token login. Centralized operation and maintenance also greatly improves the efficiency of asset management and maintenance.

Integrated computing power: quickly build new interactions

The digital transformation of enterprises cannot be separated from software applications. Through computing nests, Alibaba Cloud and hundreds of ISVs have built joint solutions to provide users with more and better services together with ISVs. Provide richer solutions for customers' digital transformation.

For example, in the field of immersive experience, Alibaba Cloud, together with its partners, has built a full-process visual computing solution. As an emerging trend, immersive experience will greatly improve the user experience in the live broadcast, customer service, interaction and other aspects of financial scenes. Pan Yue, head of Alibaba Cloud's heterogeneous computing products, shared the industrial changes, technology and business challenges brought by immersive experience at the Financial Innovation Summit.

Pan Yue, head of Alibaba Cloud heterogeneous computing products

In response to the technical challenges brought by immersive experience, Alibaba Cloud heterogeneous computing has achieved super performance and IO capabilities through DPCA architecture, and has improved the acceleration ratio of large-scale GPU clusters on the cloud through underlying optimization, forming the largest heterogeneous computing cluster in Asia. At the same time, the implementation of immersive experience applications needs the support of huge computing power and ecology. Alibaba Cloud, together with Nvidia, Parallel Cloud and other partners, has built visual computing solutions.

The cloud XR platform is a joint product of Alibaba Cloud and parallel cloud. The Alibaba Cloud XR platform can provide services from the infrastructure to the platform layer, covering rendering, coding, streaming and other processes. Developers can access it through the SDK. It supports both zero-code application deployment and more flexible secondary development. Application developers only need to publish and host their applications to the cloud XR platform to automatically complete cloud deployment and application encapsulation, and end users can easily experience applications through different terminals.

Zhang Xintao, an expert of Alibaba Cloud's heterogeneous computing products, shared that Pizhen Technology deployed a national style sci-fi virtual concert "The Trouble Square" through the cloud XR platform.

Zhang Xintao, Alibaba Cloud elastic computing product expert

The performance is "real-time", whether it is lighting or performance. Through connecting with the original offline equipment, the lighting engineer can light up in real time, and the artist can sing in the moving clothes, and synchronize the action to the virtual image in real time. The technology will originally rely on the performance of offline large-scale venues, and present in a more wonderful way online. The audience does not need to pre-install the software in advance, and does not occupy the actual storage space. Just click the invitation link to directly enter the virtual world of the new Wulin, greatly reducing the threshold of participation.

Alibaba Cloud's visual computing solution can quickly build a metauniverse business hall for financial customers, provide personalized services through virtual digital people, and provide users with immersive service experience.

There are many similar solutions in the computing nest, providing various solutions for the digital transformation of financial customers. In the future, Alibaba Cloud will continue to work with software manufacturers to accelerate the digital transformation of Chinese enterprises and promote the digital development of industries.