AI makes the edge smarter, and the edge makes AI everywhere

About city management and city services are gradually moving towards intelligence and intelligence. By the end of 2019, 100% of sub-provincial cities, more than 95% of prefecture-level cities, and more than 50% of county-level cities across the country have proposed the construction of new smart cities, and 32 major cities have established dedicated big data management Institution, responsible for work related to smart city construction. Among them, video is one of the main data in the city, the demand for visual AI analysis is increasing, and the requirements for visual AI professionalism are also getting higher and higher.

Since 2012, relevant national ministries and commissions have gradually introduced various policies and regulations, and urban management and urban services have gradually become intelligent and intelligent. By the end of 2019, 100% of sub-provincial cities, more than 95% of prefecture-level cities, and more than 50% of county-level cities across the country have proposed the construction of new smart cities, and 32 major cities have established dedicated big data management Institution, responsible for work related to smart city construction. Among them, video is one of the main data in the city, the demand for visual AI analysis is increasing, and the requirements for visual AI professionalism are also getting higher and higher.

"Hybrid cloud all-in-one machine" (Apsara Stack Appliance) is oriented to edge computing scenarios and provides software and hardware integrated solutions. Through pre-installation, pre-integration, and in-depth tuning, it also supports remote delivery and centralized operation and maintenance, effectively improving system availability and Operation and maintenance efficiency makes it easy for enterprises to realize cloud-side linkage and help enterprises achieve rapid innovation in the 5G era. This time, Alibaba Cloud has upgraded the "hybrid cloud vision AI all-in-one machine". AI makes the edge more intelligent. The edge makes AI everywhere.

product description

"Hybrid cloud vision AI all-in-one machine" is mainly oriented to urban transportation and urban service scenarios. It is an integrated product form of software and hardware. It not only includes a hardware matrix system that supports cloud-side collaborative computing, but also includes a unified IaaS base that supports different hardware. , Provide computing, database, storage and other basic cloud computing capabilities on the edge. At the same time, we combined the needs of visual analysis and built visual AI PaaS components in the all-in-one machine, such as a video gateway, a visual algorithm intelligent scheduling engine, and a visual library. Based on the capabilities of the AI edge cloud, the all-in-one machine meets the needs of specific industries such as transportation and urban services, providing a large number of visual image cognitive understanding and inductive reasoning algorithm services of Dharma Academy, as well as in-depth industry ecological applications. The product form of this hardware and software integrated machine can greatly simplify the IT architecture, improve the efficiency of deployment and operation and maintenance, and realize rapid replication and promotion through pre-integration, testing and optimization.

product specifications are diverse, suitable for different computing needs
In response to the needs of different computing power in different scenarios, the current "hybrid cloud vision AI all-in-one machine" has formed four main specifications: intensive computing, computing storage, NPU enhanced, and embedded array. Among them, the NPU enhanced uses Alibaba's own The developed Hanguang 800 chip greatly enhances the video analysis and processing capabilities. The embedded array is oriented to scenarios where humans and machines coexist, greatly reducing power consumption and noise, and can be deployed in daily office environments.

Hybrid cloud unified base, integrated operation and maintenance system
The "Hybrid Cloud Vision AI All-in-One Machine" uses a hybrid cloud unified base, with infrastructure at the bottom, and then realizes the unified operation and maintenance of PaaS and IaaS based on the hybrid cloud unified base, and presents a set of systems to the outside. For cloud products, whether it is IaaS products or PaaS products, unified access according to the baseline, and at the same time, the standard cloud-native solutions, driving business upgrades, from container operation and maintenance to PaaS operation and maintenance, and finally upgrade To an integrated and integrated operation and maintenance system

Dharma Academy's urban visual intelligence engine to meet the needs of different visual AI
The urban visual intelligence engine is committed to building a city-level artificial intelligence model through cloud computing and artificial intelligence, relying on Alibaba Cloud’s distributed computing and storage platform, using advanced video images, graphics processing technology, and deep learning algorithms to establish a city-level artificial intelligence model to achieve the entire city Visual data access, calculation, analysis, indexing, mining and reasoning, and empower various industry scenarios such as transportation, fire protection, and environmental protection, open up urban data pipelines, explore the value of data, and build new urban infrastructure. The urban visual intelligence engine is one of the first batch of national artificial intelligence open innovation platforms and one of the largest artificial intelligence public systems in the world.

Product architecture

First of all, the "Hybrid Cloud Vision AI All-in-One Machine" uses highly convergent standardized hardware. Servers, storage, and networks are all devices that are deeply optimized and customized by the server R&D department of Alibaba Group for visual analysis. For example, network devices support unique network isolation. With the mapping function, at least 4 external IPs are required to complete on-site deployment, which greatly reduces the delivery cycle and improves network stability and security.

In terms of software, the "Hybrid Cloud Visual AI All-in-One Machine" is based on the basic capabilities of cloud native, operation and maintenance monitoring, account permissions and other basic capabilities provided by the platform of the hybrid cloud unified base. Project algorithm capabilities, serving more than ten urban functional departments such as transportation, emergency, electric power, and environmental protection.

core advantages

【Ultra High Performance】
Alibaba's self-developed NPU chip (including optical 800) improves hardware performance by 60%; self-developed vector quick comparison algorithm, tens of billions of base database retrieval 2s return, 100 million static database comparison 1000QPS.
[Unified scheduling]
Through the function of algorithm integration development, it breaks the "chimney" construction in multi-algorithm scenarios and is compatible with multi-manufacturer algorithms, so as to realize the unified scheduling and output of algorithms; realize resource pooling sharing and unified management based on k8s.
【Smart Prevention and Control】
Contains more than 100 urban vision AI algorithms developed by the DAMO Academy's Urban Brain Laboratory, providing comprehensive, full, and real-time intelligent analysis capabilities.

Application scenario

"Hybrid cloud vision AI all-in-one machine" is mainly oriented to urban transportation and urban services. It solves the large scale of urban video. Full video aggregation requires extremely high bandwidth capacity, computer room load, and construction cost, and urban video analysis content is diverse, and the equipment is on-board. Limited software and hardware computing capabilities cannot meet a large number of analysis needs; large-scale cloud platforms have long construction periods, high costs, and weak solution reproducibility. They are widely used in more than 10 scenarios such as high-speed, traffic management, safety production, and housing construction. .

For example, in the construction of the urban brain of a certain city, in order to overcome the lack of existing systems to solve the difficult problems of urban governance, traffic congestion and other livelihood problems through big data artificial intelligence technology, the edge side was realized through the "hybrid cloud vision AI all-in-one machine" Video intelligent structure analysis, and converged to the cloud computing center, through the combination of artificial intelligence and big data analysis of the multi-source data fusion of the video, and the use of digital twin technology, the traffic law analysis and problem diagnosis are realized, which greatly improves the traffic travel efficient.

In 2019, the country began to cancel the high-speed self-owned flow of toll stations at the provincial boundary. Alibaba Cloud, together with Dharma Academy and AutoNavi, built a "traffic data center", and adopted the "hybrid cloud vision AI integrated machine" and Dharma Academy on the edge. AI algorithm realizes real-time and full structural analysis of passing pictures of high-speed road sections and uploads them to the cloud center. The cloud center realizes the fusion correction between high-speed data and AutoNavi Internet data, with the help of big data, AI, traffic simulation, etc. New technologies have promoted the intelligent upgrade of the audit business in the own-flow scenario.

"Hybrid cloud vision AI all-in-one machine" meets the needs of small and medium-scale video analysis at edge nodes, and relies on Alibaba's lightweight cloud platform and visual intelligence open platform to support the cognitive understanding and inductive reasoning of video images in multiple industries such as transportation and urban services. Algorithm service, unified video aggregation and real-time analysis on the scale of hundreds of channels to a thousand channels at edge nodes, and aggregate structured data to the cloud computing center, perform secondary calculation or storage of data, and realize the ultra-large-scale city with cloud and edge integration Distributed video processing provides a fast and lightweight video analysis solution that integrates software and hardware.

[Watch the all-in-one machine release] https://yqh.aliyun.com/live/apsara\_stack\_appliance\_new\_release

[More hybrid cloud information] https://www.aliyun.com/solution/hybridcloud

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