CSG Launches News Cloud Supercomputing Platform

Guangzhou - China Southern Power Grid dispatching cloud supercomputing platform, the first cloud supercomputing platform in the domestic China electric power industry, has recently come into service.
Concurrently, the accurate numerical weather prediction system (typhoon mode) has been based on the cloud supercomputing platform which is currently in operation.
In response to this year’s No.7 typhoon, named “Chapaka”; the supercomputing typhoon mode ran smoothly in ensuring a stable power supply which was indispensable during this emergency command scenario.
Jointly constructed by engineers from China Southern Power Grid and Alibaba Cloud, the cloud supercomputing platform, using Alibaba-developed Aspara and the X-Dragon (Shenlong) Architecture, can complete floating-point arithmetic more than 825 trillion times per second. Its computing capacity (per node) is five times faster compared with conventional cloud computing servers and can go up and down following real time needs of the Company.
Most of the power supply facilities in Guangdong, Guangxi, Yunnan, Guizhou and Hainan, where China Southern Power Grid operates, are vulnerable to meteorological disasters such as typhoons, ice coating and wildfires as they are installed outdoors.
Faults and trip-out happen frequently during typhoon days which cause disturbing daily power supplies. As a result, an accurate weather prediction system has been equipped with powerful computing capacities is of vital importance for China’s electric power industry as well as throughout the international community.
Right before the star of the current typhoon season, the accurate numerical weather prediction system (typhoon mode) is based on the cloud supercomputing platform that today is now in operation.
The prediction system, developed by CSG senior managers, can track typhoons and provide prediction models seven days in advance, and deliver updates every 30 minutes at its best in six-hour short-term and immediate weather events. Going forward, the calculation time needed for typhoon predictions will continue to drop through capacity expansion.
In recent years, CSG senior managers have been bringing forward smart technologies like cloud computing and AI into the Company to help build and empower the new power system.
Earlier in 2018, China Southern Power Grid senior managers and their counterparts at Alibaba Cloud began cooperating to establish a dispatching cloud platform … the “brain” of the entire power grid system.
In future days, the prediction accuracy of power grid load by CSG Power Dispatching and Communication Center was raised to 97.63%, thanks to the AI application developed based on the dispatching platform.
“The launching of the dispatching cloud supercomputing platform demonstrates CSG's ambition to accelerate digital transformation when it dispatches electricity and features a new start of high-performance parallel computing for the dispatching cloud platform,” said Liang Shouyu, automation technology expert, CSG Power Dispatching Control Center.
In the future, the CSG dispatching cloud supercomputing platform is expected to  be applied to unique scenarios like power spot markets and new energy power prediction, which require vast computing capacity.