Feb. 25, 2020 — The European Processor Initiative is announcing the first EPI Forum to take place in Paris, France, on March 16-17, 2020.

EPI is going full speed ahead to meet the goals of our mission – European independence in HPC technologies and a favorable global position in the race towards exascale.

In a two-day event, the consortium will host experts from HPC ecosystem, engineers, researchers and global players in the field, to attend sessions, round tables and keynote speeches from prominent executives and experts.

Hosted near the beautiful Champs-Élysées, at the Elysées Biarritz venue, the first day of the event will tackle interesting topics such as architecture choice, the rise of EPI Common Platform as an EU central computing unit, an overview of processing cores, and the introduction of SiPearl, EPI’s industrial hand.

The forum will also provide the attendees with inputs and worldwide views from technology providers and intriguing discussion regarding bringing new EU HPC processor to market and associated challenges. Prominent keynotes include experts such as Brent Gorda, senior director of HPC, Infrastructure Line of Business Arm, Steve Scott, SVP, Senior Fellow & CTO of the HPC & AI Business Unit at HPE, Paul de Bot, Senior Director, TSMC Europe B.V., Mitsuhisa Sato, Deputy Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, and Robert Hoekstra, PhD, Manager, Scalable Architectures, Computing Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories.

The second day of the EPI Forum will feature a keynote speech from RISC-V Foundation CEO, Calista Redmond, followed by discussions on automotive and edge HPC, EPI software stack, programming models, use of accelerator cores and exascale applications.

“EPI project is strongly supported by the European Commission and we are proud to serve the European ambition toward sovereignty. As sovereignty is becoming more and more important, EPI is going to play a central role in the European HPC landscape. Initially, with the design of the RHEA processor, on next-generation Arm Neoverse architecture, we are going to equip the European exascale supercomputer. In parallel, as part of our long-term strategy, we are starting to build foundations for our future European IP toolbox based on a variety of IP solutions including RISC-V, which will target custom accelerators and microprocessors.  Our ambitious vision should begin to show concrete results with first-generation processors by SiPearl in the field by 2022. The first EPI Forum, much like the project itself with its strategy of supplying products in the short term and achieving EU sovereignty in the long term, will allow attendees to become acquainted with how those short- and long-term ambitions are tightly articulated,” stated Jean-Marc Denis, EPI Chairman of the Board.

“There is demand for the type of performance and innovation that Arm Neoverse-based processors deliver, and this is evident in the growth of the Arm HPC ecosystem,” said Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm.  “Our collaboration with the EPI and SiPearl is strategically important to our goals in HPC, and Arm supports the EU on its road toward greater processor independence and exascale deployments.”

“As the European number one in High-Performance Computing, Atos is fully supportive of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s ambitious strategy to boost European technological self-reliance. Atos is proud to lead the effort to design a family of European processors for HPC and for other emerging markets, in our role of coordinator of the EPI project. Atos has a long history of commitment to the development of the Arm ecosystem for HPC, particularly through our role in the pioneering Mont-Blanc projects. With EPI, we are taking this ambition to a different scale, and this is good news for the robustness of the European industry,” said Arnaud Bertrand, Senior Vice President, Global Head of BDS Strategy, Innovation and R&D at Atos.

“HPE has been a strong supporter of the Arm ecosystem with both our Apollo and Cray systems and software for HPC and AI and we are excited to partner with SiPearl and the EPI consortium,” said Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager, High-Performance Computing and Mission Critical Solutions, HPE. “As the leader of the global hybrid IT and HPC markets, HPE is uniquely positioned to leverage and distribute SiPearl processors on future systems to customers around the world.”

“The future of computing is dramatically changing, driven by the digitalization of many industries as compute workloads change with the arrival of big data,” said Ravi Subramanian, senior vice-president at Mentor, a Siemens Business. “The European Processor Initiative is the most significant pan-European initiative in computing over the past two decades. Mentor is excited to participate in and contribute to this initiative by bringing key experts together in Paris for the first EPI Forum to help chart the future of the entire EPI ecosystem.”

“As a key partner to the European Processor Initiative, we are proud that our solutions contribute toward the creation of state-of-the-art high-performance computing processor technologies designed in Europe, “ said Luc Elman, VP Customer Excellence Europe at Synopsys.”

“GENCI as a French actor of the HPC-driven and AI-driven simulation activities in science is very proud to participate and support the EPI initiative which will achieve a major contribution to the European sovereign digital revolution supported by co-designed exascale systems funded by EuroHPC,” said Philippe Lavocat, President and CEO of GENCI.

Event details and registration is available at https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/epi-forum/.

About EPI 

The European Processor Initiative (EPI) is a project currently implemented under the first stage of the Framework Partnership Agreement signed by the Consortium with the European Commission (FPA: 800928), whose aim is to design and implement a roadmap for a new family of low-power European processors for extreme scale computing, high-performance Big-Data and a range of emerging applications.

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Source: EPI