A major milestone towards building entirely made-in-Europe future High Performance Computing (HPC) systems: 10 Partners from 6 EU Member States join forces to build the first 100% European out-of-order (OoO) RISC-V core, a set of advanced tightly couple accelerators, as well as the novel software suite which will take full advantage of the novel processing unit.
The eProcessor ecosystem combines open source software and hardware to deliver the first complete European full stack ecosystem based on a new RISC-V CPU coupled to multiple diverse accelerators that target both traditional HPC as well as mixed precision workloads for High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) including AI, ML, DL and Bioinformatics applications.
eProcessor will be extendable (due to its open source manner), energy-efficient (due to its low power consumption), extreme-scale (due to its high performance), extensible (since it will allow for seamless addition of on-chip and/or off-chip components) while it will be optimized for both HPC and embedded applications.
eProcessor is based on cutting edge research on SW/HW co-design to achieve sustained processor and system performance; this will be accomplished by combining a highly powerful, yet low-power, out-of-order processor core with novel, adaptive on-chip memory structures and management, as well as fault tolerance features and tightly coupled accelerators. The development process consists of SW simulations, HW emulations using FPGAs, and implementation of real ASIC prototypes so as to demonstrate the full stack feasibility of the hardware and software.
eProcessor Stimulates European Cooperation
eProcessor harnesses and extends the work done in multiple European projects including: European Processor Initiative, Low-Energy Toolset for Heterogeneous Computing, MareNostrum Experimental Exascale Platform, POP2 CoE, LEGaTO, Tulipp, EuroEXA, and ExaNeSt. As a result it will develop a high Technical Readiness Level (TRL) end-solution while the involved European industrial partners will provide a direct path to commercialization.
A World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe
eProcessor is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and it involves a pan-European consortium consisted of top Universities, Research Institutes and SMEs: Chalmers University of Technology, Foundation for Research and Technology- Hellas, Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza, Cortus, Christmann Informationstechnik, Universität Bielefeld, Extoll GmbH, Thales, and Exapsys.
eProcessor is funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking Scheme, which combines EuroHPC funding with resources from the involved member states, Spain, Sweden, Greece, Germany, France, Italy matching EuroHPC funding. The project supports the objective of EuroHPC JU to develop innovative supercomputing technologies and applications to underpin a world-class European HPC ecosystem as well as its aim to improve quality of life, advance science, boost industrial competitiveness, and ensure Europe’s technological autonomy.
Significant Impact to society
According to John D. Davis, Director of the Laboratory for Open Computer Architecture at BSC, which leads the project, “eProcessor focuses on raising sustained performance -as a percentage of the peak performance achievable by the system-, which is especially relevant for applications with non-cacheable data access patterns. The combination of these aspects, with our novel approach of co-designing hardware and software for various emerging application domains, in addition to conventional HPC ones, will lead to significant impact to society.”
The efficiency of the end platform will be demonstrated in i) a smart mirror application, leading to visual diagnosis of illnesses, ii) a personalised medicine application, leading to faster time to patient cure, iii) unmanned aerial vehicles, leading to more effective search and rescue operations.