Alibaba Cloud Wins CAA Science and Technology Progress Award for Ultra‑Large‑Scale Cloud Network Technology

The China Automation Association (CAA) announced its 2023 Science and Technology Awards, granting Alibaba Cloud, together with Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the first‑class Science and Technology Progress Award for their ultra‑large‑scale cloud network technology and application results.

The award recognizes a high‑performance breakthrough in massive cloud network regulation, enabling task configuration distribution at the hundred‑thousand level to be completed within seconds, filling a domestic gap in this field.

CAA’s expert committee highlighted the project’s technical complexity, difficulty, and strong innovation, noting it as a successful practice that helps China catch up with world‑leading levels in cloud computing networks and build an independent ecosystem.

Founded in 1961 by renowned aerospace scientist Qian Xuesen, CAA is one of China’s earliest national academic societies, annually selecting outstanding scientific and technological achievements, including the prestigious Science and Technology Progress Award.

With the rise of large‑model AI, the demand for massive data flow in training, inference, and rapid iteration has surged, requiring ultra‑high‑performance network control. Historically, key large‑scale cloud network control technologies were dominated by foreign academia and industry.

To address this, Alibaba Cloud partnered with Zhejiang University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University for over a decade, developing novel ultra‑large‑scale, high‑performance cloud network control technologies, published at the flagship networking conference NSDI (Networked Systems Design and Implementation), breaking the foreign monopoly.

Technical breakthroughs include:

Massive network data management platform delivering high‑performance write, storage, and query, greatly improving decision‑making efficiency.

Millisecond‑level high‑performance configuration calculation engine for real‑time complex network configuration.

Large‑scale, highly reliable configuration distribution technology achieving second‑level distribution and minute‑level verification for hundred‑thousand‑scale tasks.

Multi‑modal network anomaly detection achieving zero‑intrusion application‑layer online diagnosis and minute‑level self‑healing configuration.

A diagram (shown in the original article) illustrates the architecture of the ultra‑large‑scale cloud network control key technology.

Alibaba researcher and head of Intelligent Cloud Network, Zhu Shunmin, emphasized that network is the digital economy’s highway, and each breakthrough drives digital society forward; the award validates their AI‑scenario‑oriented high‑throughput, low‑latency network control solution.

The award follows previous recognitions, including Zhejiang Province’s 2021 Technology Invention First Prize, CCF’s 2021 and 2023 Technology Invention Awards, marking the fourth high‑level accolade for Alibaba Cloud’s “Luoshen” cloud network, which underpins core Alibaba Group services for over 4 million customers across education, finance, retail, manufacturing, and more.

Luoshen’s work has been published in top international conferences such as SIGCOMM, NSDI, INFOCOM, and MobiCom, and Alibaba Cloud has been listed among the world’s top ten computer network research institutions in the AI 2000 ranking.