"The history of human development is the history of energy utilization." From drilling wood for fire to nuclear power plants, and even the recent news hot spot "controllable nuclear fusion", the ability of human beings to master energy is a symbol of the development of human civilization. In economic development, electricity is the basic support for all economic activities, ranging from home office to railway transportation, from power lighting to intelligent AI, all of which are inseparable from power support, and the power system is the "basic unit" of power output. It has become the "foundation" for the development of many industries. Now the power system has successfully entered the era of informatization and intelligence, and the development stage has entered the stage of regional grid interconnection from large-scale development.
Power System Business Background
Power system design keeps pace with the times. From the original pen and paper drawing to the current professional industrial design software, the complexity and efficiency of the design have been greatly improved. From the perspective of business construction, the power system has more and more functions, which makes the design of the system more complex, including the design of ultra-high voltage transmission network to distribution network, as well as the design of overall engineering and product equipment, etc. . From the perspective of data generated by business, the amount of data in the power system increases simultaneously with the expansion of the scale. From the drawing form of 2D design drawing to the current 3D industrial design software, a power device can be disassembled into several parts when designing a 3D model. Hundreds to tens of thousands of accessories, the data volume of this type of design model is usually between tens of MB and several GB; and the data volume generated in the simulation verification stage is exponentially increased, because the simulation process will generate a large number of environment Data and various physical quantity data, such as mechanical quantities, electromagnetic quantities, etc., usually have a cumulative verification data volume of more than TB, and a large amount of product design model data and verification data is the product data volume. Therefore, the demand for data storage has shown a sharp increase. These data have formed a valuable product database in the power industry, and the huge amount of data has given birth to a mature industrial system.
Ideas for the construction of large-scale business data platform of State Grid
As the power system construction becomes more and more mature, the business has higher requirements on the design results of power equipment, and the business hopes that the design and manufacturing process can be more efficient, and the most fundamental way to improve efficiency is to adopt advanced design software and IT that matches these business software Platform, in which the IT platform includes three core capabilities, namely computing, network, and storage. With the advancement of digital construction in the electric power industry, more and more technologies are applied to the electric power industry to improve overall efficiency and reduce construction costs, including many mainstream IT technologies used in infrastructure construction, such as the integration proposed in the construction guidance of this project Deployment construction technology, containerized computing technology, GPU acceleration technology, distributed high-performance storage technology. In addition to carrying power equipment design, these technologies can also support the operation of more other business systems. The IT platform needs to have a certain degree of wide applicability to maximize the economic applicability, thereby enhancing the comprehensive strength of the power system.
This construction is a domestic provincial-level unified planning and operation of the national grid project. The provincial center and 13 municipal data centers under its jurisdiction carry business systems including "digital twins", "artificial intelligence central control platform", and "power equipment design system" , "Power Transmission and Transformation Engineering Monitoring System" and other professional business systems and general office systems.
Due to the large number of business systems, the length of the article is limited. This time we list several business sectors to analyze their business characteristics.
Business sector one
A large number of industrial design 3D simulation software are used in the power design system of this project, such as: Solidworks, 3Ds Max, CATIA, Rhino, Cinema4D, VRay, etc.; professional power software is also used, including: BPA and PSASP, PSS/E, EMTP/ATP. These two types of software basically constitute the main application areas of power design. Business requirements put forward high-performance requirements for IT computing, network and storage. Especially in 3D simulation applications, data volume growth and high-performance requirements are particularly obvious.
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A large number of 3D file model designs require high bandwidth reading requirements;
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The business system of the VDI desktop used in the design process requires a lot of sharing and concurrent requirements;
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The data ranges from graphics to design and rendering, as well as simulation state volume files (small files + large files), coexistence optimization;
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For the growth of data volume brought about by business growth, long-term management issues;
Business sector two
The "digital twin" and "artificial intelligence central control platform" constructed this time are typical AI application scenarios, which have high requirements for massive data storage and computing. AI is used to assist in business management, and the digital twin must achieve a 1:1 ratio. Business simulation restoration, this process will generate a large amount of data, especially the multi-dimensional event status information.
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In the "digital twin" business, the data volume of small files and large files soars with the growth of the business;
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The "artificial intelligence central control platform" needs to process a large amount of business data interaction with the assistance of AI, and this process will generate a large number of small files;
Business sector three
The "power transmission and transformation system" design applies more 3D power equipment and a complete set of electrical design requirements. Taking the power transmission and transformation substation as an example, the business process includes the following parts:
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3D fine design
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Simulation verification physical model
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A full set of professional calculations and checks
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Generate full professional construction drawings
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Digital Handover Results
In the design process of "power transmission and transformation system", the design software will read a large amount of data during the loading process, and a certain amount of temporary data will be generated during the calculation process; Scale simulation validation data. These data are used as the basis for the final analysis of various attributes of the equipment. The more data dimensions, the more accurate the analysis. At present, this type of technical specification has become the mainstream practice in the industry, and the design and verification of the entire process of equipment is fully completed, which greatly reduces the time. cycle and overall cost input. Data sharing is required in the process from "refined design" to "generating professional construction drawings";
Business sector four
In the construction of this project, in addition to meeting the business characteristics requirements of the first few major business segments, it is also necessary to meet the use of conventional office business systems. A total of 13 provincial data centers and city data centers will be built this time. The professional business systems of each data center are different, but the general office business is a unified system that needs to support the office business storage needs of various departments.
Based on the above analysis, the power system business has the following requirements for IT infrastructure construction:
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Computing and storage converged deployment, adopting mainstream technologies, meeting business versatility, scalability and economy;
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The business system has a huge amount of data, and there are AI business type and industrial design type data, which have strict performance requirements;
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Designing systems such as business systems and digital twins requires data to have high-performance sharing capabilities;
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The overall construction should ensure high reliability requirements and ensure the stable operation of the business system;
Construct efficient storage of power IT platform in comprehensive application environment
Combined with the business needs of the State Grid, this time adopts the integrated deployment plan, that is, the storage platform in the project is constructed through the Yanrong distributed file storage system YRCloudFile, and the computing platform is built through the second cloud container cloud product, and the overall integrated deployment The X86/ARM hardware platform is adopted, which meets the selection requirements of the project construction.
In the construction of the storage platform, YRCloudFile, a high-performance distributed file storage, adopts a distributed storage architecture, and the data storage can be elastically expanded. The scalable data volume can reach EB level, and the metadata scale can reach tens of billions. The production requirements of the current business and the expansion needs of the future business take into account performance stability. The IT basic platform built by multiple mainstream technologies such as containerized computing and distributed storage has realized functions such as container persistent storage, GPU virtualized computing, and business data life cycle management. The characteristics of the overall platform construction plan are as follows:
Converged Architecture
The computing platform adopts second cloud containerized computing, and the storage platform uses Yanrong's high-performance file storage YRCloudFile, which provides YRCloudFile file storage space to container computing through the CSI interface to achieve container persistent storage capabilities, and provides services such as QoS, quotas, and hotspot tracking and other functions to meet high-efficiency computing scheduling and high-performance support for massive data.
Since computing and storage adopt integrated deployment technology, standard server hardware is used for the hardware platform, which greatly reduces the pressure on back-end spare parts for operation and maintenance, and ensures long-term stable operation of the business. Compared with the traditional solution, the hardware expenditure cost is reduced by 40%, and the power consumption and equipment room space are reduced by more than 50%. Through the integrated deployment, the user cost expenditure is greatly reduced.
Meet high-performance business
The business systems "3D power equipment design", "digital twin", "artificial intelligence central control platform", and "power transmission and transformation system design" have the same business characteristics, and have high performance requirements for data calculation and storage reading and writing. In order to give full play to the computing power, the storage end adopts YRCloudFile high-performance file system. Since the YRCloudFile file system provides the POSIX protocol of the private client, it can meet the high-performance throughput requirements of GPU and CPU at the computing layer. The YRCloudFile metadata design adopts a distributed structure to maintain stable performance under the tens of billions of files. Compared with the traditional storage architecture, YRCloudFile file storage can improve business efficiency by 75%, and the design process can be shortened from about a week to 2-3 days.
Data Sharing Capabilities
In this application system construction, computing clusters need to share data. YRCloudFile is a file storage type, which naturally has data sharing capabilities and provides standard NFS/SMB protocols. In addition, it can also provide private client protocol, CSI interface, etc., which can satisfy tens of thousands of concurrent mounts under the TCP protocol. The same data can be shared with users through authority management, avoiding traditional data islands.
high reliability
Both Miaoyun Container Cloud and Yanrong YRCloudFile file storage are distributed and fully symmetrical deployment architectures with high redundancy. The container computing switching process is completed in seconds, with high responsiveness and no impact on business. At the same time, in terms of hardware selection, standardized enterprise-level hardware is adopted, with enterprise-level service standards and 99.99999% reliability.
Platform scheme construction architecture diagram
Under the understanding of the digital construction of data as assets, the storage platform construction, as the most important part of the overall IT infrastructure, needs to meet various needs. Due to the distributed storage architecture design, it can maintain continuous and stable performance in massive data scenarios It is the core driving force of this construction. Business scenarios such as "digital twin", "artificial intelligence central control platform", and "power equipment design" carry massive amounts of data, and the requirements for storage have changed from "storage" to "storage" + "fast access". There are a large number of small files in the business system, and the read and write performance of traditional storage has become a bottleneck. The YRCloudFile distributed file system uses distributed metadata technology to solve the performance problem of fast access to small files.
In the mixed file scenario, YRCloudFile comprehensively optimizes the mixed scenario of large files and small files, and can release performance advantages whether it is accessing small files or large files. The online test of the storage access network constructed this time can run full bandwidth, and YRCloudFile is compatible with all mainstream network protocols and devices, and can support a maximum of 200Gb IB network overlay. Users can choose appropriate network devices and solutions according to business needs. ?
Yanrong YRCloudFile parallel file architecture adopts metadata high-performance design and data caching technology. It is oriented to massive data scenarios and adapts to 3D power equipment design, power transformation system design, and artificial intelligence business scenarios in this project. At the same time, it adopts CSI, Various protocol interfaces such as POSIX, NFS/SMB, etc., as container computing persistent storage, can give full play to the storage characteristics, realize multiple monitoring through WEB monitoring, meet the daily operation and maintenance requirements of users, and realize data life cycle management.
Based on Kubernetes as the core base, Miaoyun container cloud realizes functions and services such as cluster management, multi-tenant management, Linux and Windows application life cycle management, container and virtual machine unified management, shared GPU scheduling, CI/CD, and microservice governance. Adopt GPU scheduling technology to maximize the use of GPU computing power resources and avoid waste of computing power resources.
Outlook
In this power system construction, it can be seen from user feedback and practice that the power energy industry has transformed from the traditional model to the direction of intelligence and digitalization after years of transformation, and a large number of 3D technology and artificial intelligence technology are used in the business. All rely on the support of massive data. Data, or assets, has penetrated into the industry and become an indispensable part of productivity. Effective use of business data to create value is the key direction of IT infrastructure construction.
When selecting storage models, enterprises need to consider efficient data management and expansion requirements, so that business can develop rapidly. The wide applicability of the storage platform in this construction is obvious, and the requirements for comprehensive storage capabilities are more comprehensive. While deploying professional business systems, conventional office systems also need to be deployed. Yanrong YRCloudFile file storage not only has the characteristics of ultra-high performance, but also has the attributes of high scalability and ease of use. Let users really feel good storage "no choice" business, good applicability, and realize cost reduction and efficiency increase for customers.