Could RISC-V become a force in high performance computing?

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Meanwhile, Euro supercomputer project makes a call for developing an HPC ecosystem based on the architecture

www.theregister.com/, Feb. 08, 2023 – 

ANALYSIS The RISC-V architecture looks set to become more prevalent in the high performance computing (HPC) sector, and could even become the dominant architecture, at least according to some technical experts in the field.

Meanwhile, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has just announced a project aimed at the development of HPC hardware and software based on RISC-V, with plans to deploy future exascale and post-exascale supercomputers based on this technology.

RISC-V has been around for at least a decade as an open source instruction set architecture (ISA), while actual silicon implementations of the ISA have been coming to market over the past several years.

Among the attractions of this approach are that the architecture is not only free to use, but can also be extended, meaning that application-specific functions can be added to a RISC-V CPU design, and accessed by adding custom instructions to the standard RISC-V set.

This latter could prove to be a driving factor for broader adoption of RISC-V in the HPC sector, according to Aaron Potler, Distinguished Engineer at Dell Technologies.

"There's synergy and growing strength in the RISC-V community in HPC," Potler said, "and so RISC-V really does have a very, very good chance to become more prevalent on HPC."

Potler was speaking in a Dell HPC Community online event, outlining perspectives from Dell's Office of the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer.

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