RISC-V for Cloud Services

Building on top of outcomes from the EPI and EUPilot projects, RISER will develop the first all-European RISC-V cloud server infrastructure, significantly enhancing Europe's open strategic autonomy.

RISER will leverage and validate open hardware high-speed interfaces combined with a fully-featured operating system environment and runtime system, enabling the integration of low-power components, including the RISC-V processor chips from EPI and EUPilot and LPDDR4 memories, in a novel energy-efficient cloud architecture.RISER brings together a set of 7 partners from industry and academia to jointly develop and validate open-source designs for standardized form-factor system platforms suitable for supporting cloud services.

Specifically, RISER will build the following two cloud infrastructures:(1) An accelerator platform, which includes the ARM-based RHEA processor from EPI and a PCIe acceleration board that will be developed within the project which will integrate up-to four RISC-V based EPI and EUPilot chips.(2) A microserver platform, which interconnects up to ten microserver boards all developed by the project, each one supporting up to four RISC-V chips coupled with high-speed storage and networking.

Embracing hyperconvergence, the microserver architecture will allow for distributed storage and memory to be used by any processor in the system with very low overhead.The open-source system board designs of RISER will also be accompanied by open-source low-level firmware and systems software, and a representative Linux-based software stack to support cloud services.

To evaluate and demonstrate the capabilities of the RISER platforms we will develop three use cases: (a) Acceleration of compute workloads, (b) Networked object and key-value storage, and (c) Containerized execution as part of a provider-managed IaaS environment.

RISER will offer open access to the microserver platform, facilitating uptake and enhancing the commercialization path of project results.