At the first meeting of the APKIT Advanced Technologies Committee, participants in the Russian ICT market discussed development opportunities and the potential of the ARM ecosystem
Moscow, October 8, 2020 – The first meeting of the APKIT Advanced Technologies Committee was held in Russia, initiated by the LANIT group of companies, Huawei and Baikal Electronics, with the support of the
The APKIT Advanced Technologies Committee was established to develop and promote new technologies, as well as build an ecosystem of software solution developers based on new hardware platforms. The development of the ecosystem involves the creation of a support system for members of the entire community, as well as the stimulation of the most relevant areas for the development of promising technologies, namely, new architectures of software and hardware systems, artificial intelligence systems, robotic solutions, big data technologies, free software and high-performance computing.
At the meeting, held in the format of an online forum, the goals and objectives of the Committee’s activities were determined, and the development and use of various innovative technologies were also discussed. In addition, the participants of the meeting demonstrated for the first time the successful results of testing applications on the ARM architecture, which was included in the Committee’s list of priority technologies as one of the most important for information and communication technologies in Russia. presentation
In his opening speech, APKIT Executive Director Nikolai Kolev noted: “The general idea of the committee is to support promising technologies, their development, and help those companies that are engaged in this area. On the one hand, we intend to help the companies themselves share experience, connect them with each other, on the other hand, to be a translator of our requests and requirements to the state.”
Speaking about the possible directions of the committee’s work for the implementation of state tasks, Chukrasin emphasized the importance of analyzing the possibilities of overcoming restrictions and barriers that impede the development of promising technologies in the country, assessing the potential for introducing promising technologies in the sectors of the economy and the social sphere, and selective import substitution to ensure the country’s cybersecurity.
“We understand that it is impossible to fully build the necessary infrastructure for the digital economy, development and acceleration of digital transformation on existing domestic technologies, selective import substitution of technologies and digital solutions of those countries that support the sanctions regime against our country is necessary,” Chukrasin emphasized.
Touching upon the topic of the ARM ecosystem, Andrey Chukrasin agreed with the speech of the coordinator of the Committee for Advanced Technologies Ilya Levchenko (Huawei Tech Company LLC) that the most important tasks for its development are: evaluating the performance of ARM solutions, standardizing the use of ARM-based solutions in Russia and identifying tools code migrations for ARM. presentation
Andrey Chukrasin shared information that as a result of recent changes in national projects within the framework of the federal project “Digital Technologies”, only two promising technologies were included in the passport, for which road maps (DK SDT) were approved in 2020 under agreements with the Government of the Russian Federation Federations: 5G mobile communication networks (digital services), presentation
Alexey Novodvorsky, Deputy General Director of Basalt SPO, said that his company has long been creating infrastructure software on ARM and developing products that, among other things, can be used to migrate existing software to the company’s platform. “I believe that the ARM platform is now very mature, and this migration can now be carried out, especially since we have powerful and good Taisha servers from Huawei, we have Baikal-M, these boards will soon go into series. Now we can set serious tasks for migration and the tools for this are already ready,” Novodvorsky said.
Evgeni Sinelnikov, head of the Saratov engineering department at Basalt SPO, urged developers to actively develop the ARM ecosystem. “We are ready to interact with hardware developers in order to develop support for solutions on ARM, we provide our distributions for development testing. If someone wants to test software on ARM within the framework of the import substitution theme, he can freely download our distributions.
Regarding the creation of the ARM ecosystem in Russia, Cherepennikov said: “The new ecosystem needs a “center of gravity”, so what we are trying to do in Russia is some kind of industrial alliance, it is very important, as this will significantly save resources and lead to increased efficiency.”
Representatives of LANIT-Integration (part of the LANIT group) Marat Zalotdinov and Ilda Zakie tested the Huawei Taisha ARM server based on the Kunyenga chip, which showed decent results out of the box (without additional adaptation, configuration and optimization).
Explaining why Huawei Taisha was chosen for testing, the colleagues emphasized that this decision was not only related to minimizing sanctions risks. One of the criteria was the use of this server by their partner clients, noting that a number of enterprise applications are already compatible with ARM servers and successfully run on them, performing real tasks.
During the meeting, the committee members agreed on further cooperation and optimization of the performance of Taisha servers and software from Redo’s.
CDNvideo representative Andrey List pad spoke about testing Huawei Taisha for block storage based on CEPH, which showed a significant reduction in latency. According to List pad, thanks to Taisha servers, the company was immediately able to provide additional benefits for customers. These servers are already installed in their data centers and are also used for commercial services.
List pad also spoke about the Shopping Festival event, for which the company not only acted as a cloud supplier, but also developed software for live broadcasts on servers with the ARM Kunken architecture. The event included 300 simultaneous live broadcasts, which were watched by almost a million viewers.
As part of an open discussion at the end of the meeting, the issues of using ARM mobile servers and the further agenda of the Committee were also discussed. The next meetings, which will be held in November and December of this year, will tentatively be devoted to x86 to ARM migration tools, ARM standards, as well as new possible directions for the development of promising technologies.
Forum participants noted that the creation of the Advanced Technologies Committee would undoubtedly help the development of innovative technologies in Russia, as well as contribute to the creation of a stable ecosystem.
