Huawei has officially launched a global "call for heroes" to the scientific research community, initiating the 2025 OlympusMons Awards with a million-dollar prize pool for collecting challenging problems. The total bounty for this initiative is as high as 3 million yuan, aiming to pool global wisdom to overcome a series of fundamental challenges emerging in the fields of data storage and processing under the wave of artificial intelligence (AI).
With the rapid evolution of AI technology, particularly the application of intelligent agents, data is undergoing a profound transformation: not only is its scale exploding, but its nature, retention methods, and management paradigms are also being reconstructed. Traditional data storage systems are increasingly facing multiple pressures, including massive computational overhead, complex protocol stacks, difficulties in building knowledge bases, the trade-off between reasoning efficiency and accuracy, and soaring storage costs.
Against this backdrop, Huawei's current OlympusMons Awards directly target the core pain points of the industry, openly soliciting innovative solutions capable of reshaping the foundational data infrastructure for AI.
The 2025 OlympusMons Awards focus on two forward-looking directions, aiming to systematically build a future-oriented data infrastructure from the hardware medium to the software architecture level.
Specifically: Direction One: Innovative medium technology for the AI era. The proliferation of AI is drastically changing data access patterns; "cold" data is frequently activated to become "warm" data, and "warm" data is further transformed into "hot" data requiring immediate processing, leading to a significant increase in computational load and energy consumption. This direction calls for research into new paradigms of "supplementing computation with storage" and "exchanging storage for computation," exploring innovative technologies such as ultra-high-density information recording and hierarchical large memory, with the goal of creating new storage systems that are high-performance, high-capacity, and cost-effective. Specifically, it requires overcoming three细分 technical challenges: computing-storage fusion and efficient indexing technology based on SSDs; storage channel modulation and coding technology for ultra-high recording density; and hierarchical large memory network protocols and IO path optimization technology.
Direction Two: An Agentic AI-native data foundation. The booming development of Agentic AI demands that storage systems evolve from passive, static "data warehouses" to active, intelligent "data platforms." This direction is dedicated to researching key technologies such as high-quality knowledge base construction and semantic information distillation, to build a data foundation truly born for agent applications. It specifically includes two攻坚 goals: knowledge extraction, multimodal data representation and knowledge retrieval technology; and semantic information distillation technology for efficient large model inference.
To incentivize global researchers to tackle these cutting-edge challenges, the Huawei 2025 OlympusMons Awards have established an attractive reward mechanism. It is reported that this edition will select 2 "OlympusMons Awards" and 5 "OlympusMons Pioneer Awards." The winning individuals or teams will not only share the total high prize money of 3 million yuan but will also be able to establish deep technical exchange channels with Huawei and gain further support for scientific research resources. The selection will comprehensively consider the value of the participants' existing research achievements, as well as the performance of their proposed follow-up research plans for the bounty challenges across multiple dimensions such as technical foresight, innovation, and potential commercial value.
The "OlympusMons Awards" were established by Huawei in 2019, named after Olympus Mons, the highest known mountain in the solar system on Mars, symbolizing the encouragement for researchers to courageously scale the peaks of basic theory and technology in the data storage field. This award has long been committed to attracting global top-tier intellect to jointly break through key technological bottlenecks in the storage field, accelerate the transition of scientific research成果 from the laboratory to industrial application, and achieve synergistic wins for industry, academia, and research.
Since its establishment, the OlympusMons Awards have had a significant impact globally, cumulatively attracting participation from over 320 top scholars from 12 countries. To date, 6 OlympusMons Awards and 18 OlympusMons Pioneer Awards have been successfully presented, continuously injecting vitality into the innovative development of the data storage industry, and it has now become one of the internationally influential professional awards in this field.
Through this bounty, Huawei once again demonstrates that in today's increasingly competitive AI technology landscape, fortifying the foundation of data storage and processing is crucial. The 3 million yuan global bounty is not only recognition of the value of innovation but also an active call to jointly build the ecosystem for the next generation of data infrastructure.
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