The Future of HPC is Open
Monday, June 28, 2021 1:35 PM to 1:55 PM · 20 min. (Africa/Abidjan)
Stream#1
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Contributors:
Abstract:
While Moore´s Law is not dead, it is slowing and becoming more difficult to sustain. New fabs are becoming cost prohibitive to build, stagnating the move to the next technology node and traditional CMOS scaling approaches have come to an end. In this new technology environment, some of the rules have changed. This has produced a shift from abundant transistors to efficient use of transistors. Thus, to truly meet the HPC power and performance (FLOPS/W) requirements, we must specialize the hardware, using co-design of the full stack, all layers of hardware and software. This level of integration is not possible in a closed or even partially open ecosystem. Openness is required to tailor your hardware platform to the applications, thereby achieving the desired performance in the power constrained environment. Mirroring a similar model as Linux, RISC-V has followed a similar development path and has enjoyed significant industrial and academic adoption. Like Linux before it, the RISC-V ecosystem is in the nascent period where it can become the de facto open hardware platform of the future. The RISC-V ecosystem has the same opportunity in hardware that Linux created as a foundation for open source software. This enables the co-design of the RISC-V hardware and the entire software stack, creating a better overall solution than the closed hardware approach that is done today. In this talk, we will look at the ingredients required to create this open HPC ecosystem of the future.
Abstract:
While Moore´s Law is not dead, it is slowing and becoming more difficult to sustain. New fabs are becoming cost prohibitive to build, stagnating the move to the next technology node and traditional CMOS scaling approaches have come to an end. In this new technology environment, some of the rules have changed. This has produced a shift from abundant transistors to efficient use of transistors. Thus, to truly meet the HPC power and performance (FLOPS/W) requirements, we must specialize the hardware, using co-design of the full stack, all layers of hardware and software. This level of integration is not possible in a closed or even partially open ecosystem. Openness is required to tailor your hardware platform to the applications, thereby achieving the desired performance in the power constrained environment. Mirroring a similar model as Linux, RISC-V has followed a similar development path and has enjoyed significant industrial and academic adoption. Like Linux before it, the RISC-V ecosystem is in the nascent period where it can become the de facto open hardware platform of the future. The RISC-V ecosystem has the same opportunity in hardware that Linux created as a foundation for open source software. This enables the co-design of the RISC-V hardware and the entire software stack, creating a better overall solution than the closed hardware approach that is done today. In this talk, we will look at the ingredients required to create this open HPC ecosystem of the future.
