European Processor Initiative, project performed by 27 partners from 10 countries, held its second edition Forum event in Paris, on Oct 6-7. The event was hosted by the magnificent Les salons de l’Hôtel des Arts & Métiers with a hundred attendees.
The two-day event brought numerous presentations from global leaders in technology, keynotes from eminent experts, talks on Arm and RISC-V ISA, technical sessions from EPI researchers and two panels with distinguished speakers. The event was supported by partners, and sponsored by platinum sponsors DDN, Eviden, and gold sponsors AMD, CEA, E4, and SiPearl.
The first day was started off by EPI Chairman of the Board, Eric Monchalin, who gave the introduction into why this event was organized by EPI and invited to the stage distinguished speakers to offer their insights into the hot topic of European sovereignty.
In what was dubbed the VIP Forum opening, Emmanuel Le Roux from Eviden, Jean François Lavignon from TS-JFL, Karim Ayoum from Teratec and Raphaël Brochard from EAR, all gave their perspectives on why European sovereignty matters and what is EPI’s role in it.
The day continued with the first keynote, from David Atienza Alonso from EPFL, who titled his presentation Beyond the Bottleneck: AI as the catalyst for green HPC. His speech was met with palpable focus from the audience – especially as he was discussing ML-based techniques (in particular deep learning – DL) to address the challenge of an accurate performance prediction and run-time optimization of resources in HPC servers and data centers, as well as reconsidering how data centers and cloud MPSoC architectures are designed and operated to enable a sustainable future.
The baton was taken over by Etienne Walter, EPI’s General Manager, who presented an Overview of EPI, explaining how the project started in SGA1, EPI’s phase 1 in 2018, and how it got to where it is now.
The next section was dedicated to EPI’s supporters and platinum sponsors – Eviden and DDN. Jean-Pierre Panziera, EPI’s longtime friend, talked about the rise of AI and how it is reshaping compute capabilities, system architectures, power and cooling demands, and usage models, and what Eviden is doing to meet those challenges.
Jean-Thomas Acquaviva and Laurent Lassere told the audience all about what DDN could do in terms of key interoperability features, when it comes a fully European sovereign system – and with slides mentioning chocolate, so the attention was all theirs!
The Gold sponsors’ section also featured some EPI long standing partners and friends – the section was opened by one of EPI’s most prominent names, Philippe Notton, from SiPearl, who revealed to the audience some new dual-use ideas getting ready to be released from SiPearl. CEA, as next Gold sponsor, was presented by Jean-Philippe Nominé, while E4 presentation about both EPI pillars – Rhea and EPAC – was masterfully delivered by Elisabetta Boella. Stephen Robotham, presenting AMD, delivered their input on HPC and AI infrastructure and its open ecosystem approach. Though not a consortium partner, this was AMD’s second year supporting us in the endeavor of creating a setting for the Forum.
The first day was finished by a panel moderated by Eric Monchalin – aptly titled European sovereignty in HPC, Edge and AI.
The second day was opened by another very engaging keynote – Carlo Cavazzoni from Leonardo gave a speech on Breaking HPC Silos, in which he addressed specificities of Leonardo’s business decisions and how they also impacted their work in EPI. It was followed by a morning panel session moderated by Etienne Walter, titled Making the convergence between Cloud, HPC, AI and Edge.
The afternoon of the second day was reserved for technical sessions from EPI, focused on outcomes in two EPI pillars – Arm and Rhea, and RISC-V, and another crucial point of discussion – co-design.
The first presentation after the panel was taken by SiPearl’s champions, Craig Prunty, Céline Scetbun and Philippe Notton – they covered the beginnings of SiPearl and the development of Rhea as well as current state of play.
The second presentation was by Lilia Zaourar from CEA, Estela Suarez from FZ Jülich and Manolis Marazakis from FORTH. In a talk titled It takes a village to build a processor, they talked about how co-design faces challenges including architectural complexity and the need for scalable performance evaluation across diverse teams and how they tackled this in EPI through a hierarchical methodology combining fast high-level models with detailed simulations, balancing speed and accuracy.
The final keynote of the day was delivered by Marc Duranton, another CEA leader, who gave a riveting speech on Empowering European Digital and AI Sovereignty. He presented scientific trends in the domain of computing and artificial intelligence that could be an opportunity for European organizations to catch up.
Alexandra Kourfali gave a unique perspective from EuroHPC JU’s point of view – on RISC-V and Arm for Energy-Efficient, Sovereign Supercomputers. Her talk examined the evolution of EuroHPC’s dual-architecture approach, focusing on how RISC-V and ARM processors are being integrated into Europe’s roadmap for next-gen supercomputers.
Final talk of the day came regarding another technical session – RISC-V in EPI. Filippo Mantovani from BSC showcased the progress made in advancing open hardware for high-performance computing, Mario Kovač from UNIZG-FER talked about developing the FPU for EPI, while Nikolaos Dimou from FORTH talked about test chips and prototype platforms.
The Forum was attended by more than 100 people, who also actively participated in the discussions, during the presentations, and in the lively discussions in the breaks.
Materials from the Forum are available in our Dissemination and communication repository: https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/dissemination-material/epi-forum-2-materials/
