EPCC becomes a member of RISC-V International
28 June 2022
EPCC has become a community member of RISC-V International, a free and open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) which has become hugely popular since it was first released over a decade ago.
RISC-V is revolutionary because, by contrast, traditional ISAs are proprietary and closed, where only very limited numbers of companies are able to provide implementations and/or expensive licences are required which can come with their own restrictions. This classical closed-shop approach can ultimately limit overall choice and technological development, as well as stifle creativity and experimentation.
By contrast, RISC-V encourages contributions from members and a rich open ecosystem has built up around it, with many diverse implementations (many themselves open source) available. Overseen by RISC-V International, open standards are produced by the community, which includes companies, academics, and hobbyists, who are then free to implement them via their own specific microarchitectures and tools.
The open nature of RISC-V results in numerous concrete benefits. Firstly, as with any popular open project, the availability and ability to become involved means that there are many eyeballs on the standard itself. Being able to leverage such a wide range of diverse talent has resulted in an ISA which is widely agreed to be extremely effective. Furthermore, a range of software technologies including popular compilers, operating systems, libraries, and applications have been made available for RISC-V by the community.
In EPCC we host the ExCALIBUR Hardware and Enabling Software (H&ES) RISC-V testbed. Starting a couple of months ago, the objective is to make available a range of RISC-V CPUs to HPC code developers and ExCALIBUR projects, enabling easy experimentation with the architecture for HPC codes. In addition to packaging and integrating existing RISC-V soft-cores, we are also using our HPC expertise to port key HPC libraries and tools that are required by users. Hence joining RISC-V International as a community member is a great opportunity to connect with the RISC-V community more closely and to ensure the activities we undertake are useful more widely to users.
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