HAMBURG, Germany, June 8, 2022 – Università di Bologna, CINECA and E4 Computer Engineering (E4) are very proud to have promoted and equipped the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) Team “NotOnlyFLOPs” at the Student Cluster Competition 2022, which has taken place on May 30th – June 1st in Hamburg, Germany at ISC22, with providing the RISC-V “Monte Cimone” cluster, procured by Università di Bologna, and jointly developed by Università di Bologna, CINECA and E4 Computer Engineering. 

At this year’s edition of the Student Cluster Competition, 17 student teams from all over the world have competed on-line. Moreover five European teams participated on the exhibition floor of the ISC conference.  

The online competition kicked off on March 14th, 2022, and the onsite competition commenced on May 30th, 2022. The winning teams was announced in the last day of ISC 2022 after the onsite teams completed their benchmarking and application tasks.  

The competing teams had the opportunity to access advanced technology systems while adhering to the rules of the competition, which are demanding strict power constraints while achieving the highest performance across a series of standard HPC benchmarks and applications. 

With the target of achieving the best balance between power consumption and ideal performance, Università di Bologna, CINECA and E4 co-designed at the end of 2021 the “Monte Cimone” Cluster, a RISC-V highly effective platform based on six compute nodes, powered by SiFive Freedom U740 RISC-V SoC. The cluster is assembled in a 25U standard rack, including compute nodes, switches and air cooling. Six nodes were provided by Università di Bologna to the NotOnlyFLOPs team, to be integrated with 8 identical nodes provided by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.  

The NotOnlyFLOPS completed successfully the competition and was voted the Fan Favorite Winner team.

“E4 is honored to have  supported the NotOnlyFLOPs team in this interesting journey,” said Cosimo Gianfreda, CTO at E4 Computer Engineering, – “We have always encouraged  the new generations and be supportive of the work of students and scientists who are as passionate about HPC as we are. Furthermore, we are expert in RISC-V and have recently co-designed and deployed Monte Cimone, the first HPC cluster based on RISC-V, at Università di Bologna.”

“The NotOnlyFLOPs team has always been driven by friendship, collaboration and desire to push our limits exploring new technologies. After the geopolitical difficulties that affected the preparation of the 2022 cluster, we are extremely grateful that University of Bologna and E4 accepted with such a short notice to help the team.” said Filippo Mantovani, one of the advisors of the team from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – “Joining the nodes of the Monte Cimone cluster with the ones coming from Barcelona is an example of the spirit that moves the team: all together we have shown that collaborating and joining forces we can be a stronger team and reach higher.”

“The ISC Student Cluster Competition is a tremendous opportunity for testing ‘in the field’ RISC-V technologies. Università di Bologna is actively advancing the RISC-V ecosystem and the SCC provide an excellent opportunity to put the ecosystem ‘at work’ as well as to promote the growth and the development of the engineers who will be driving the future of our industry,” said Luca Benini, Full Professor of Electronics at the Università di Bologna. “We believe that Monte Cimone, the RISC-V cluster that we have co-developed, is the ideal platform for enabling students to learn the architecture of an advanced ISA and bring this experience in the market.”

About E4 Computer Engineering 

E4 Computer Engineering designs and manufactures highly technological solutions for HPC Clusters,​ Cloud, Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Hyper-Converged infrastructure for the Academic and Industrial markets. We have been collaborating for years with the main research centers at national and international level (Cineca, CERN, ECMWF, LEONARDO) and we are involved in national and European projects in the HPC and AI fields (EuroHPC JU EPI, EUPEX, Horizon Europe)​.

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Source: E4 Computer Engineering