Huawei Unveils Winners of the Sixth OlympusMons Awards, Honoring Efforts to Tackle Storage Technology Challenges in the AI Era

Summary:

• The winners of the sixth OlympusMons Awards were officially announced at the 2026 Global Data Storage Expert Forum, honoring seven leading global research teams.
• At the forum, Huawei announced the technology directions and challenges of the seventh OlympusMons Awards, driving continuous innovation and advancement in the data storage industry.

The winners of the sixth OlympusMons Awards were officially announced at the 2026 Global Data Storage Expert Forum. Seven leading global research teams were recognized for innovative research and technological breakthroughs in data storage, winning one OlympusMons Award and six OlympusMons Pioneer Awards. The Key Laboratory of Intelligent Storage and Computing team, led by Prof. Shen Zhirong and Prof. Zhang Yiming, was presented with the OlympusMons Award, the highest honor, for an innovative proposal—Research on I/O Optimization and Efficient Organization Techniques for Hierarchical Memory Systems. The team achieved high-performance data access on xPUs and significantly enhanced inference efficiency.

As a leading competition in the data storage field, the sixth OlympusMons Awards align with the technological evolution and industry needs of the AI era, focusing on two directions: Innovative Storage Media Technologies for the AI Era and Agentic AI-Native Data Foundation. The competition aims to address a variety of challenges, including high media costs, low capacity density, poor performance of memory-class storage, difficulties in multimodal knowledge representation and retrieval, and semantic information redundancy. Such efforts drive continuous innovation and advancement in the data storage industry, laying a solid data foundation for large-scale AI adoption.

The competition attracted over 160 experts and scholars from 30 universities and research institutions. After a rigorous evaluation process that showcased the strong academic foundations and innovation vitality within the global data storage field, seven teams were selected as winners. The OlympusMons Award was presented to the Key Laboratory of Intelligent Storage and Computing team, led by Shen Zhirong and Zhang Yiming, for their Research on I/O Optimization and Efficient Organization Techniques for Hierarchical Memory Systems. The OlympusMons Pioneer Award was awarded to six other teams, including:

• Research on Key Techniques for Quantitative Investment Based on Knowledge Graphs and AI Agents by the Chen Lei team from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
• Full-Stack I/O Collaborative Optimization for Agentic AI Workloads by the Xu Erci team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University
• Ultra-Lightweight Document Image Parsing and Knowledge Extraction by the Chen Zhineng team from Fudan University
• Enhancing Compute with Querying: Efficient Inference System of Long-Sequence Large Models Driven by Semantic Information Condensation and Query Reuse by the Liu Fangxin team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University
• Lightweight Indexing and Offload-Friendly Operator Techniques for High-Performance, Large-Capacity SSDs for Large Models by the Hu Yuchong team from Huazhong University of Science and Technology
• Crossing the Probabilistic-Logic Barrier by the Frank van Harmelen team from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

At the forum, Chang Sheng, Director of Huawei Data Storage R&D Mgmt Dept, announced the technology directions and challenges of the seventh OlympusMons Awards.

• Direction 1: Storage Technologies That Deliver Ultimate Per-Bit Cost Efficiency—which aims to deliver ample capacity and superior cost-efficiency for storage of mass data and achieve high-performance access to state data through storage media innovation. This direction consists of two key challenges: ultra-high-density storage and efficient retrieval technology for mass data, and memory-class storage media and near-storage acceleration technology for state data.
  
  
• Direction 2: Agentic AI-Native Data Foundation—which aims to address the data supply bottlenecks for agent workloads and build trustworthy, traceable, and reusable enterprise data assets that AI can understand, thereby accelerating large-scale AI adoption. This direction covers two key challenges: efficient data supply technology centered on token production efficiency, and highly-generalized and evolvable knowledge representation technology based on ontology-driven knowledge graphs.
  
  

FAQs:

Q1：What are the OlympusMons Awards?

The OlympusMons Awards, launched by Huawei in 2019, are designed to steer research in foundational data storage theories, overcome key technical challenges, accelerate the industrial application of scientific breakthroughs, and foster collaboration between industry, academia, and research institutions. The awards have become a leading and highly regarded accolade in the data storage industry.