Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) announced the European Laboratory for Open Computer Architecture (LOCA). LOCA’s mission is to design and develop energy efficient and high performance chips, based on open architectures like RISC-V, OpenPOWER, and MIPS, in Europe, for use within future exascale supercomputers and other high performance domains. ““We are launching it with great conviction, because it is another step in our philosophy of paving the way for the creation of European HPC architectures.”
European Processor Initiative Reaches Important Milestones in First Year
The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has announced the completion of important milestones in its first year. “The first-generation chip family, named Rhea, will include Arm ZEUS architecture general purpose cores and prototypes of high energy-efficient accelerator tiles: RISC-V based (EPAC), Multi-Purpose Processing Array (MPPA), embedded FPGA (eFPGA) and cryptography HW engine. First Rhea chips will be fabricated in N6 technology aiming at the highest processing capabilities and energy efficiency.”
Podcast: RISC-V CEO Sees Bright Global Future for Open Source CPUs
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team catches up with Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V. “RISC-V can be used for light weight tasks such as embedded processing but, on the other hand, is also going to be utilized as the system accelerator for the European Exascale initiative boxes. That’s some serious flexibility.”
How the European Processor Initiative is Leveraging RISC-V for the Future of Supercomputing
In this special guest feature, Calista Redmond writes that the European Processor Initiative is designing an HPC accelerator based on RISC-V. “The accelerator will be designed for high throughput and power efficiency within the general purpose processor (GPP) chip. The EPI explains that using RISC-V enables the program to leverage “open source resources at [the] hardware architecture level and software level, as well as ensuring independence from non-European patented computing technologies.”
Calista Redmond named CEO of RISC-V Foundation
Today the RISC-V Foundation announced that Calista Redmond has been appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective immediately. I’ve always understood the potential short- and long-term impact of the RISC-V license-free ISA on the open source community. Having spent a lot of my career working in the open source ecosystem, I’m excited to help RISC-V grow and deliver on the Foundation’s mission of paving the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation,” said Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V Foundation.”
Mateo Valero on how RISC-V can play a major role in New Supercomputer Architectures
In this eeNews report, Mateo Valero, Director of the Barcelona Supercomputer center, explains how the RISC-V architecture can play a main role in new supercomputer architectures. Valero was the keynote speaker at the recent RISC-V Workshop in Barcelona. “Born in academia and research, RISC-V ISA delivers a new level of free, extensible software and hardware freedom on architecture, paving the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation.”
Radio Free HPC Looks at the European Processor Initiative
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the European Processor Initiative, an effort to design a build an exascale computer based around European technology. “According to an interview in Primeur Magazine with EPI project coordinator Philippe Notton from Atos, the project involves not only a processor, but an accelerator as well. Will it be based on ARM, OpenPOWER, or something else like RISC-V? We will have to wait and see.”
Realizing Exabyte-scale PM Centric Architectures and Memory Fabrics
Zvonimir Bandic from Western Digital gave this talk at the SNIA Persistent Memory Summit. “Much has been debated about would it take to scale a system to exabyte main memory with the right levels of latencies to address the world’s growing and diverse data needs. This presentation will explore legacy distributed system architectures based on traditional CPU and peripheral attachment of persistent memory, scaled out through the use of RDMA networking.”
Video: Introduction to RISC-V
Mellanox announced today that it has joined the RISC-V foundation as a Founding Platinum Sponsor. The RISC-V foundation promotes the open RISC-V instruction set architecture and associated hardware and software ecosystem for a broad range of computing devices.