Birds of a Feather

HPC Next: The RISC-V Ecosystem

Authors: John Davis (Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)), John Leidel (Tactical Computing Laboratories LLC), Doug Norton (Inspire Semiconductor), Nick Brown (Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC)), Michael Wong (Codeplay Software Ltd, UK), Steve Wallach (Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL))

Abstract: RISC-V is an open instruction set standard which is experiencing extraordinary growth and has the potential to revolutionize supercomputing. There are a growing number of RISC-V activities by the HPC community, and the goal of this BoF is to continue the discussion with the community about the RISC-V ecosystem and how it can best support HPC research and development. Beginning with a short overview on the status of the RISC-V HPC ecosystem, this will be followed by a Q&A with the panel and audience. There will be directed questions, as well as ad hoc questions and discussions with the audience.

Long Description: An Open Standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) like RISC-V enables a powerful co-design paradigm. Presently, RISC-V lacks the maturity of other closed ISAs available on the market and many in the HPC community are unfamiliar with the details of RISC-V and/or incorrectly associate the ISA and development efforts as being limited to the embedded community. However, today, there is a focused and dedicated effort underway within the RISC-V community (well-funded companies, government support, and research) to bring RISC-V into the HPC space. As part of this BoF, we will update the larger community on our efforts (identify the HPC gaps, provide standardized ISA solutions and lead the effort to build up the ecosystem) as well as solicit feedback for prioritization of next steps. First, we will present the status of the current SW and HW RISC-V ecosystem with a focus on HPC (20 minutes) including discussion of our ongoing RISC-V HPC Software testbed. Next, we will have an interactive discussion about the future of RISC-V and HPC with the aim of creating an HPC ecosystem based on Open Source (40 minutes). The latter discussion will include a gap analysis and prioritization of targets in HPC with RISC-V hardware and the associated software.

Website: https://lists.riscv.org/g/sig-hpc