BARCELONA, May 4, 2018 — Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) are hosting the RISC-V Workshop in Barcelona, gathering the open source processor design community to share RISC-V updates, projects and implementations. Founded in 2015, the RISC-V Foundation comprises more than 100 members building the first open, collaborative community of software and hardware innovators powering innovation at the edge forward. BSC is promoting the adoption of RISC-V as a key partner of the European Processor Initiative, the consortium to design and develop Europe’s low-power processors and related technologies for extremescale, high-performance computing, which will be funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme.

The RISC-V Workshop in Barcelona will take place at the UPC from Monday 7 of May to Thursday 10. More than 300 delegates from all over the world will be attending this event to explore this disruptive technology, learn about its benefits, and understand the commercial implications for the industry. Speaking sessions include international computing luminaries from industry, such as supercomputing pioneer Steve Wallach, and from academia, such as Mateo Valero, co-founder and director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Mateo Valero and his colleagues at BSC, together with other European institutions, have been promoting RISC-V adoption in Europe by the development of RISC-V based accelerators. These accelerators are a key component in the recent European Processor Initiative (EPI) proposal to European Commission and will be targeted to exascale supercomputers. Exascale supercomputers, which are currently in the research stage, will be capable of performing one quintillion (1018) floating-point operations per second.

As part of this RISC-V strategy, BSC has recently joined the RISC-V Foundation as a silver member. “The RISC-V Foundation is very pleased to welcome BSC as a new Foundation member and into the RISC-V ecosystem overall,” said Rick O’Connor, executive director of the non-profit RISC-V Foundation. “The BSC team is a recognized leader in the high performance computing sector, and we look forward to their contributions as RISC-V based accelerators are deployed within exascale systems.”

The European Processor Initiative will be implemented over the next four years with a roadmap to build HPC processors, developed entirely in Europe, for supercomputing exascale systems which will be delivered by 2023. This objective is considered strategic by the 16 European member states signatories of the European declaration on High-Performance Computing (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/european-declaration-highperformance-computing) to ensure that Europe will have a competitive place in the HPC landscape, which has been dominated by the US, China and Japan.

About Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is the national supercomputing center in Spain. BSC specializes in High Performance Computing (HPC) and its mission is two-fold: to provide infrastructure and supercomputing services to European scientists, and to generate knowledge and technology to transfer to business and society.

BSC is a Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence and a first level hosting member of the European research infrastructure PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). BSC also manages the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES).

BSC is a consortium formed by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government, the Business and Knowledge Department of the Catalan Government and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC).

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Source: Barcelona Supercomputing Center