At HUAWEI CONNECT 2019, Huawei announced an investment of USD 1.5 billion in the next 5 years as part of its Developer Program 2.0. The goal is to partner with enterprises and individual developers to build the ecosystem of the computing industry. The leading ICT solutions provider also unveiled the Kunpeng Developer Kit and ModelArts 2.0 AI development platform for software development on the Huawei Kunpeng and Ascend computing platforms.
Huawei Invites Developers to Build the Ecosystem of the Computing Industry
Huawei Developer Program 1.0 was launched at the first Huawei Developer Conference in 2015. Since then, Huawei has released open communications products, cloud services, Ascend AI computing, and Kunpeng computing capabilities. Its global contribution includes 21 OpenLabs, developer communities, developer contests, and talent certification. Huawei now has 1.3 million registered individual developers and works with over 14,000 enterprise developers to innovate products and solutions to create value for customers.
Mr. Patrick Zhang, CTO of Huawei Cloud & AI Products & Services, explained the five focuses of Huawei Developer Program 2.0 in the next five years:
- Building an open computing industry ecosystem based on Kunpeng + Ascend computing processors
- Establishing an all-round enablement system
- Promoting the development of industry standards, specifications, demonstration sites, and technical certification system
- Building industry-specific application ecosystems and region-specific industry ecosystems
- Sharing Kunpeng and Ascend computing power, making it available to every developer
Upholding the principles of Lab as Service, End-to-End, Agile, Dedicated, and Social (LEADS), Huawei Developer Program 2.0 continues to optimize processes, communities, and resources in the four stages of development: awareness, learning, building and go-to-market. This E2E support enables more efficient software development on Huawei platforms. Among the resources provided are Kunpeng sample code, Ascend training cards, cloud service vouchers, OpenLabs, training and certification, and developer contests. Huawei also provides support for application migration for ISVs, Huawei FAE development, marketing, and showcase construction. To sponsor further industry growth, Huawei has set up the learning development fund (LDF), product development fund (PDF), and marketing development fund (MDF) for the learning, building, and go-to-market stages respectively.
Huawei Kunpeng Developer Kit Supports Software Migration and Development on Huawei Kunpeng Computing Platform
Mr. Seaway Zhang, President of Huawei TaiShan & Atlas Domain, shared his thoughts on the Kunpeng ecosystem. “Its development is accelerating. In the past nine months, our work with partners has migrated over 3,000 popular applications to the Kunpeng ecosystem. Kunpeng infuses unrivaled efficiency into every line of code.”
Kunpeng helps accelerate digital transformation for every industry thanks to its innovative features:
- Device-edge-cloud homogeneity breaks boundaries between data centers, edges, and devices with a unified computing platform for developers.
- Multi-core and high-concurrency computing is designed for big data, distributed storage, and database scenarios. Kunpeng promotes the transformation toward distributed IT architecture.
- Kunpeng + Ascend collaboration is expandable to AI computing for hot technologies such as 5G, AI, and self-driving.
- Five-level computing acceleration technology improves performance by 50% through iterative compilation, NUMA-awareness, message queue hardware acceleration, function acceleration library, and kernel scheduling self-optimization.
The Huawei Kunpeng Developer Kit comprises a compiler collection and three tools. Dependency Advisor and Porting Advisor are the first of their kind in the industry to automate application migration across computing platforms, accelerating migration and optimizing code. Developers are instruction set agnostic. Tuning Kit visualizes performance and optimizes parameters in one click for five times more development efficiency. Developers can obtain related tools and knowledge bases from the one-stop Kunpeng Developer Community. In addition, HUAWEI CLOUD DevCloud integrates the Kunpeng Developer Kit to make software development tools available online.
Huawei Launches ModelArts 2.0 for Efficient AI Development
Mr. Jack Jia, General Manager of the EI Product Department of Huawei’s Cloud BU, announced, ModelArts 2.0 as an upgrade to the inclusive AI development platform. This lean, automated tool improves data preparation and model training and deployment. ModelArts 2.0 lowers the threshold for AI beginners to quickly master and use AI skills. It also caters to algorithm engineers and data scientists, increasing their efficiency so they can focus on the research and innovation of basic core algorithms.
Also published at the event was Ascend AI Processor Architecture and Programming: Principles and Applications of CANN. Huawei’s first professional reference in its AI book series is compiled by subject expert Mr. Liang Xiaoyao, professor and doctoral mentor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Huawei has planned more tutorials on intelligent computing intended for use as textbooks to promote talent development for the AI industry. Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, also attended the event. He expressed that Linux had always been an important force in supporting the development of diversified computing, and that the Linux Foundation would work with Huawei to promote diversity of the computing industry.
