Speaker
Description
Over that last 3 decades, we have witnessed a transition from closed software ecosystems being the foundation for HPC, enterprise, and business to open source software ecosystems based on Linux and other software in the stack. The combination of current technology trends, the slowing of Moore’s Law, and cost prohibitive silicon manufacturing inhibit significant power-performance gains by relying on traditional closed ecosystems, especially in HPC, technology pushed to the extreme. This new regime forces systems to be much more specialized to achieve the power-performance profiles required for a supercomputer. In the past, HPC has led the way forward, defining the bleeding edge of technology. HPC can do this again with open hardware, as it has done in software with adopting Linux and open source in general. The RISC-V ISA provides the open standard in HW to enable this open HPC ecosystem. Much like Arm, RISC-V can follow the same, now accelerated path from embedded/IoT to HPC. This is not only a technology imperative, but one born out of current geopolitics. Given this technology and geopolitical backdrop, we describe how Europe can exploit its resources targeting research and development for technological independence.
