Edge Computing Developer Competition Launched, Intel and Partners Accelerate Ecosystem Innovation

Edge Computing Developer Competition Launched, Intel and Partners Accelerate Industry Ecosystem Innovation

August 26, 2021, Beijing - The Edge Computing Developer Competition, co-organized by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the Industrial Internet Industry Alliance, and the Edge Computing Industry Alliance, and co-organized by the Internet Society of China, the China Automation Society, and the Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA), was officially launched today. In this competition, Intel and Schneider Electric jointly hosted the edge control track competition, and widely recruited participating developers from universities, scientific research institutions, enterprises, institutions, start-up teams, individual developers and other related fields of edge computing application development.

Dr. Wei Chen, Vice President of Intel Corporation, Global General Manager of IoT Video Business Unit, and General Manager of IoT Business Unit China, said: "As a witness to reform and opening up, Intel has seen the rapid development of the Chinese market, especially the rapid growth of China's local ecological industry chain. During this period, Intel's role has also changed from a simple hardware product provider to an advocate for accelerating edge computing ecological innovation. Intel's technologies and solutions have been transformed into solutions suitable for China's national conditions through local partners and combined with the local needs of Chinese customers. We welcome local partners to actively participate in this competition. I wish the first Edge Computing Developer Competition a complete success!"

Dr. Chen Wei, Vice President of Intel Corporation, Global General Manager of IoT Video Division, and General Manager of IoT Division China

Deliver a speech

As the co-organizer of the edge control track, Intel will provide a combination of software and hardware products covering computing, communication and storage for the edge control track, providing strong software and hardware support for the contestants. Schneider Electric will support the edge control track with the newly released EcoStruxure™ open automation platform (EcoStruxure™ Automation Expert). The two parties jointly focus on actual industrial scenarios and sincerely invite industrial talents to learn from each other under the vision of open automation and jointly build an open and efficient industrial ecological environment.

The edge control track of this competition consists of two groups: a mass group for college students, individual developers and enthusiasts, and a professional group for professional system integrators, software solution providers, and hardware suppliers:

• The public group competition will focus on learning and understanding the knowledge of edge control based on the open automation platform and mastering basic open capabilities. Participants will participate in the competition individually. The winners of the preliminary round will receive training opportunities and apply designated hardware and software function blocks in the final round.

• The professional group will examine the participating teams' ability to write edge control solution design documents and scene realization, transplant and reuse under changing scenes, and conduct professional innovation and supply-demand docking for actual scenes. Excellent solutions will receive support for subsequent implementation. The competition topic setting is mainly based on logistics conveyor line control and logistics equipment transmission coordination based on an open automation platform.

Both the public group and the professional group will go through three stages: preliminary rounds, training for winners and finals. The winning individuals and teams can use platform resources such as winning bonuses, supply and demand matching, and entrepreneurial support to promote the implementation of their own innovative applications, prosper the edge computing ecosystem from both theoretical and practical levels, and achieve "double harvests" of economic and social benefits.

Pang Xingjian, senior vice president of Schneider Electric and head of industrial automation business in China, said: "The portability and reusability of automation solutions will be one of the important features for achieving the efficiency goals expected by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and releasing innovation potential in the future. Taking this competition as an opportunity, Schneider Electric and its partners will further promote the communication and integration of the EcoStruxure open automation platform and the open automation concept behind it with researchers and users."

For the intelligent edge, Intel has been committed to building a combination of software and hardware products for cloud-edge collaboration. The hardware products include various XPUs for computing, Ethernet communications and silicon photonics for communication, and Optane™ for storage, etc. In view of the working conditions of edge computing, the above hardware has different performance from consumer-grade products, such as wide temperature, ultra-long life cycle support, high reliability, etc.; in terms of network requirements for cloud-edge collaboration, it can seamlessly integrate 5G and other network interfaces; in addition, with Intel software, it can meet many special industry needs, such as computer vision widely combined with AI, functional safety widely used in robots and mobile vehicles, real-time technology widely used in motion control, Intel's impregnable data security, manageability for multi-machine collaboration, and virtualization technology for single-machine load integration, etc.

In addition, Intel also has a variety of software advantages with a variety of hardware, such as OpenVINO™ toolkit, OneAPI, Industrial Edge Insights Platform (EII) and other products. It is worth mentioning that another important product in Intel's edge computing solution, the Industrial Edge Control Platform (ECI), has achieved remarkable results since its release at the end of 2019, and has helped dozens of industrial customers around the world, including Schneider Electric.

Intel® Edge Control for Industry (ECI) is a software reference platform that integrates real-time computing, load integration, application and platform management, infrastructure management, industrial bus protocols, control APP examples, information security, and functional safety. It can achieve time-deterministic computing in intensive computing environments and easily transition industrial control systems to software-defined solutions. As a software reference architecture running on x86 hardware, it includes the following microservice modules: real-time computing, standard industrial bus connection, information security and functional safety, virtualization, IT-style management tools, etc., which can help factories transform and upgrade, and replace single-function, hardware-software-bound traditional industrial control systems with software-defined multi-functional, hardware-software-decoupled advanced control systems.

As a driver of the intelligent edge, Intel will rely on a series of leading product portfolios and solutions to bring together the forces of industry, academia, and research through industry competitions and other means, and work with ecosystem partners and innovators to continuously explore, accelerate ecological innovation in edge computing, promote the transformation and upgrading of my country's intelligent manufacturing, and jointly usher in a new era of "digital" and "intelligence" in China.