European Processor Initiative

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European Processor Initiative
EPI logo.svg
Country European Union (mainly France [1] )
Ministry EuroHPC
LaunchedDecember 2018;5 years ago (2018-12) [2] [3]
Budget70.000.000 [4]
Website european-processor-initiative.eu

European Processor Initiative (EPI) is a European processor project to design and build a new family of European low-power processors for supercomputers, Big Data, automotive, [5] and offering high performance on traditional high-performance computing (HPC) applications and emerging applications such as on machine learning. It is led by a consortium of European companies and universities.

Contents

The project is divided in multiple phases funded under Specific Grant Agreements. The first grant agreement is implemented under the European Commission program Horizon 2020 (FPA: 800928) in the December 2018 to November 2021 time span. The second agreement will be implemented afterwards under the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking which issued a call, which was answered in January 2021 by the same consortium (H2020-JTI-EuroHPC-2020-02 FPA in EPI (phase II)).

The processor that is to be developed is a system on a chip (SoC) that makes use of the RISC technology, implements microprocessor cores of ARM architecture and accelerators, and specialises in matrix calculations and deep learning for artificial intelligence. The processor is designed to be integrated in an exascale supercomputer, but also to be implemented in cars.

Objectives

The aim of the EPI project is to design and build a high-performance, low-power processor, implementing vector instructions and specific accelerators, such as accelerators for AI, with high-bandwidth memory access. The design will be based on the results obtained through an intensive use of simulation, the development of a complete software stack and the use of advanced semiconductor manufacturing technologies. During the development of the processor, a co-design methodology will be implemented to ensure that the processor is suitable for efficiently running many applications and that it is equipped with the appropriate software development tools. The objective of the EPI is to develop European know-how on the design and construction of processors for high-performance computing, allowing Europe technological sovereignty.[ citation needed ]

Members

EPI is a non-legal entity, a project organized by 30 institutions from 10 countries in Europe. The members of the consortium are: [6]

Members of the EPI consortium
OrganizationtypeIndustryCountry
Atos CompanyIT services and consultingFlag of France.svg  France
BSC Public research centerSupercomputingFlag of Spain.svg  Spain
Infineon CompanySemiconductorsFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
SemidynamicsCompanySemiconductorsFlag of Spain.svg  Spain
CEA Public research centerEnergy, defense, security, IT, healthFlag of France.svg  France
Chalmers University of Technology Private universityScientific and technological research, educationFlag of Sweden.svg  Sweden
ETH Zurich Public universityScientific and technological research, educationFlag of Switzerland (Pantone).svg   Switzerland
Foundation for Research & Technology – Hellas Public research centerScientific and technological researchFlag of Greece.svg  Greece
GENCI State-owned companySupercomputingFlag of France.svg  France
Tecnico Lisboa Public universityScientific and technological research, educationFlag of Portugal.svg  Portugal
Forschungszentrum Jülich Public research centerScientific and technological researchFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
University of Bologna Public universityScientific and technological research, educationFlag of Italy.svg  Italy
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb Public universityScientific and technological research, educationFlag of Croatia.svg  Croatia
Fraunhofer Public research centerApplied scienceFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
STMicroelectronics ItalyCompanySemiconductorsFlag of Italy.svg  Italy
E4 Computer EngineeringCompanyEngineeringFlag of Italy.svg  Italy
University of Pisa Public universityScientific and technological research, educationFlag of Italy.svg  Italy
Surf Public research centerScientific and technological researchFlag of the Netherlands.svg  Netherlands
Kalray CompanySemiconductorsFlag of France.svg  France
ExtollCompanySemiconductorsFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
CINECA Public research centerScientific and technological researchFlag of Italy.svg  Italy
BMW Group CompanyAutomobileFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
ElektrobitCompanyAutomobile, softwareFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
Prove & RunCompanySoftwareFlag of France.svg  France
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Public universityScientific and technological research, educationFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
MentaCompanySemiconductorsFlag of France.svg  France
SiPearlCompanySemiconductorsFlag of France.svg  France / Flag of Germany.svg  Germany
KernkonzeptCompanySoftwareFlag of Germany.svg  Germany
Leonardo CompanySoftwareFlag of Italy.svg  Italy
ZeroPoint TechnologiesCompanySoftwareFlag of Sweden.svg  Sweden

History

The initiative started in 2015, in the aim to produce an exascale supercomputer by 2023. The first phase of the project started in December 2018. [7] In the summer of 2019, the basis of the architecture was decided. [8] In January 2020, the first prototype was presented. [9]

Illustration of EPI's first working RISC-V chip sample in 2021. RISC-V EPAC.png
Illustration of EPI's first working RISC-V chip sample in 2021.

Organization of the project

The European Processor Initiative has five streams of operation. The first four are technical streams (Common Platform and Global Architecture, HPC General Purpose Processor, Accelerator, Automotive platform), while the last one is dedicated to the coordination and communication activities.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputer</span> Type of extremely powerful computer

A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High-performance computing</span> Computing with supercomputers and clusters

High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forschungszentrum Jülich</span> Interdisciplinary research centre in Germany

Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) is a German national research institution that pursues interdisciplinary research in the fields of energy, information, and bioeconomy. It operates a broad range of research infrastructures like supercomputers, an atmospheric simulation chamber, electron microscopes, a particle accelerator, cleanrooms for nanotechnology, among other things. Current research priorities include the structural change in the Rhineland lignite-mining region, hydrogen, and quantum technologies. As a member of the Helmholtz Association with roughly 6,800 employees in ten institutes and 80 subinstitutes, Jülich is one of the largest research institutions in Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MareNostrum</span> Supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

MareNostrum is the main supercomputer in the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. It is the most powerful supercomputer in Spain, one of thirteen supercomputers in the Spanish Supercomputing Network and one of the seven supercomputers of the European infrastructure PRACE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TOP500</span> Database project devoted to the ranking of computers

The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arm Holdings</span> British multinational semiconductor and software design company

Arm Holdings plc is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England, whose primary business is the design of central processing unit (CPU) cores that implement the ARM architecture family of instruction sets. It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView and Keil brands, and provides systems and platforms, system-on-a-chip (SoC) infrastructure and software. As a "holding" company, it also holds shares of other companies. Since 2016, it has been majority owned by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group.

Manycore processors are special kinds of multi-core processors designed for a high degree of parallel processing, containing numerous simpler, independent processor cores. Manycore processors are used extensively in embedded computers and high-performance computing.

Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.

Eurotech is a company dedicated to the research, development, production and marketing of miniature computers (NanoPCs) and high performance computers (HPCs).

Zero ASIC Corporation, formerly Adapteva, Inc., is a fabless semiconductor company focusing on low power many core microprocessor design. The company was the second company to announce a design with 1,000 specialized processing cores on a single integrated circuit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Europe</span> Overview of supercomputing in Europe

Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.

The HPC-Europa programmes are European Union (EU) funded research initiatives in the field of high-performance computing (HPC). The programmes concentrate on the development of a European Research Area, and in particular, improving the ability of European researchers to access the European supercomputing infrastructure provided by the programmes' partners. The programme is currently in its third iteration, known as "HPC-Europa3" or "HPCE3", and fully titled the "Transnational Access Programme for a Pan-European Network of HPC Research Infrastructures and Laboratories for scientific computing".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xeon Phi</span> Series of x86 manycore processors from Intel

Xeon Phi is a discontinued series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) such as OpenMP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">T-Platforms</span>

T-Platforms was a Russian supercomputer company. Their main competitor was RSC Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hartree Centre</span>

The Hartree Centre is a high performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) research facility focused on industry-led challenges. It was formed in 2012 at Daresbury Laboratory on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus in Cheshire, UK. The Hartree Centre is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which itself is part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The Sunway TaihuLight is a Chinese supercomputer which, as of November 2023, is ranked 11th in the TOP500 list, with a LINPACK benchmark rating of 93 petaflops. The name is translated as divine power, the light of Taihu Lake. This is nearly three times as fast as the previous Tianhe-2, which ran at 34 petaflops. As of June 2017, it is ranked as the 16th most energy-efficient supercomputer in the Green500, with an efficiency of 6.1 GFlops/watt. It was designed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and is located at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi in the city of Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, China.

The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnership in High Performance Computing (HPC), enabling the pooling of European Union–level resources with the resources of participating EU Member States and participating associated states of the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programmes, as well as private stakeholders. The Joint Undertaking has the twin stated aims of developing a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, and supporting research and innovation activities. Located in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, the Joint Undertaking started operating in November 2018 under the control of the European Commission and became autonomous in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fugaku (supercomputer)</span> Japanese supercomputer

Fugaku(Japanese: 富岳) is a petascale supercomputer at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It started development in 2014 as the successor to the K computer and made its debut in 2020. It is named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji.

The A64FX is a 64-bit ARM architecture microprocessor designed by Fujitsu. The processor is replacing the SPARC64 V as Fujitsu's processor for supercomputer applications. It powers the Fugaku supercomputer, ranked in the TOP500 as the fastest supercomputer in the world from June 2020, until falling to second place behind Frontier in June 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aurora (supercomputer)</span> US DOE supercomputer by Intel and Cray

Aurora is an exascale supercomputer that was sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and designed by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory. It has been the second fastest supercomputer in the world since 2023. It is expected that after optimizing its performance it will exceed 2 ExaFLOPS, making it the fastest computer ever.

References

  1. "The European Processor Initiative (EPI) - European Commission". eurohpc-ju.europa.eu. Retrieved 24 May 2024.
  2. katarina (4 June 2019). "First steps towards a made-in-Europe high-performance microprocessor". European Processor Initiative. Retrieved 24 May 2024.
  3. "The European Processor Initiative (EPI) - European Commission". eurohpc-ju.europa.eu. Retrieved 24 May 2024.
  4. "The European Processor Initiative (EPI) - European Commission". eurohpc-ju.europa.eu. Retrieved 24 May 2024.
  5. Mario Kovač, Dominik Reinhardt, Oliver Jesorsky, Matthias Traub, Jean-Marc Denis, Philippe Notton. "European Processor Initiative (EPI)—An Approach for a Future Automotive eHPC Semiconductor Platform". In: Langheim J. (eds) Electronic Components and Systems for Automotive Applications. Lecture Notes in Mobility. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14156-1_15 pp 185-195 First online: 26 May 2019. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-14156-1_15
  6. Community Research and Development Information Service "SGA1 (Specific Grant Agreement 1) OF THE EUROPEAN PROCESSOR INITIATIVE (EPI)". CORDIS Website. Luxembourg: EU Publications Office. https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/826647 Archived 9 December 2020 at the Wayback Machine [lists partners and budget per partner]
  7. "EPI : un premier processeur HPC made in Europe en développement". Génération NT (in French). 10 June 2019. Retrieved 13 October 2023.
  8. "How the European Processor Initiative is Leveraging RISC-V for the Future of Supercomputing". Inside HPC. 22 August 2019. Archived from the original on 22 January 2021.
  9. Michael Feldman (27 January 2020). "European Processor Initiative Readies Prototype". NextPlatform.com. Archived from the original on 1 December 2020.

Bibliography