On October 9 and 10, 2024, the European Processor Initiative organized and hosted its first EPI Forum in Barcelona, Spain.

The event was organized as a two-day conference, followed by an afternoon event organized by EUPEX project. More than 100 people attended the EPI Forum and participated in lively discussions, presentations and two panels.

The event was sponsored by six global technology providers: platinum sponsors included Arm, Eviden and NVIDIA, while AMD, Semidynamics and SiPearl were gold sponsors of the event.

After an introduction by Chairman of EPI Board, Eric Moncahlin, and a general overview of EPI given by project General Manager, Etienne Walter, the first day was opened by keynotes from notable speakers.

Director of BSC, Mateo Valero, spoke about the situation in Europe and the reasons for Buy versus Build when it comes to supercomputers, making a case for European sovereignty, and Stéphane Requena, CTO from GENCI, gave an insightful presentation about AI in Europe and infrastructure requirements, French ecosystem and GENCI’s work in the field.

The day continued with speeches from technology providers – Jean-Pierre Panziera from Eviden talked about HPC in the AI era, Eric Lalardie from Arm discussed Arm’s European activities and enabling European innovation, Daniele Piccarozzi from AMD presented his company’s solutions for HPC and AI, Philippe Notton, CEO of SiPearl, unveiled information about SiPearl’s Seine platform, while Roger Espasa, CEO of Semidynamics, gave a RISC-V-based perspective of his company’s All-in-One solutions for RISC-V AI.

The end of the first day was reserved for Arm and Rhea in high-end HPC, so EPI’s board member and SiPearl’s VP, Craig Prunty, gave an exhaustive presentation regarding key features of Rhea, GPP technology and exascale system for EPI. Following his view, Eric Monchalin introduced the end-day panel and panelists of the first day: Eric Lalardie, Jean-Pierre Panziera, Filippo Spiga from NVIDIA, Roger Espasa, Craig Prunty, Daniele Piccarozzi, Alexandra Kourfali from EuroHPC JU, and Etienne Walter. The group talked about the opportunities and risks in HPC ecosystem presented by the fact that innovation is driven with market demands which shifted towards cloud and AI, discussions about the importance of end-to-end co-design, costs of chip design, European sovereignty, and the ever-present need for sustainability and net-zero emissions.

The second day was opened by a keynote speaker from EuroHPC JU, Alenxandra Kourfali, who gave an interesting presentation on EuroHPC activities, chips initiatives, and the positioning of EPI in this environment. Her presentation was followed by NVIDIA’s take delivered by Rod Evans, who talked about the interesting concept of enabling development of AI in nations. The following segment was dedicated to RISC-V activities in EPI – and the EPI accelerator EPAC. Filippo Mantovani from BSC, EPI’s stream leader, gave an overview of EPAC and VEC, while Andrea Bocco from CEA and Tim Fischer from ETHZ talked about the variable extended precision accelerator for scientific computing applications and the Snitch core. David Snelling from Fujitsu gave a talk about Arm processor MONAKA in Fujitsu.

The day and the Forum closed with a panel on RISC-V future. It was moderated by Etienne Walter, EPI’s General Manager, and the panelists – Jean-Pierre Panziera, Daniele Gregori from E4, Manolis Marazakis from FORTH, Fabrizio Gagliardi from BSC, Alexandra Kourfalis Osman Unsal from BSC and Eric Monchalin, EPI’s Chairman of the Board – discussed about performance and scalability and how RISC-V compares to existing architectures like ARM, x86, etc., both now and in some predictions for the future. The panel also talked about the software ecosystem and whether the current one is mature enough to support large-scale HPC deployment on RISC-V. Panellists also offered their views on how the open-source nature of RISC-V would ensure standardization and avoid fragmentation in HPC implementations, ideas on cost and economic viability, energy efficiency and sustainability and IP issues – which relates to Europe’s strive for sovereignty.

The event was followed by EUPEX Forum presentations, which were open to all EPI Forum attendees to listen to free of charge.

All EPI Forum presentations are available in our repository here: https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/dissemination-material/epi-forum-in-barcelona/, while highlight videos from presentations will be published on EPI YT channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@EuropeanProcessorInitiative.

Next year’s Forum will be held in Paris, stay tuned for more info!

The Initiative will gather experts to discuss exascale future on March 16-17, in Paris

The European Processor Initiative is announcing the first EPI Forum to take place in Paris, France, on March 16-17, 2020.

EPI is going full speed ahead to meet the goals of our mission – European independence in HPC technologies and a favorable global position in the race towards exascale.

In a two-day event, the consortium will host experts from HPC ecosystem, engineers, researchers and global players in the field, to attend sessions, round tables and keynote speeches from prominent executives and experts.

Hosted near the beautiful Champs-Élysées, at the Elysées Biarritz venue, the first day of the event will tackle interesting topics such as architecture choice, the rise of EPI Common Platform as an EU central computing unit, an overview of processing cores, and the introduction of SiPearl, EPI’s industrial hand.

The forum will also provide the attendees with inputs and worldwide views from technology providers and intriguing discussion regarding bringing new EU HPC processor to market and associated challenges. Prominent keynotes include experts such as Brent Gorda, senior director of HPC, Infrastructure Line of Business Arm, Steve Scott, SVP, Senior Fellow & CTO of the HPC & AI Business Unit at HPE, Paul de Bot, Senior Director, TSMC Europe B.V., Mitsuhisa Sato, Deputy Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, and Robert Hoekstra, PhD, Manager, Scalable Architectures, Computing Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories.

The second day of the EPI Forum will feature a keynote speech from RISC-V Foundation CEO, Calista Redmond, followed by discussions on automotive and edge HPC, EPI software stack, programming models, use of accelerator cores and exascale applications.

“EPI project is strongly supported by the European Commission and we are proud to serve the European ambition toward sovereignty. As sovereignty is becoming more and more important, EPI is going to play a central role in the European HPC landscape. Initially, with the design of the RHEA processor, on next-generation Arm^® Neoverse™ architecture, we are going to equip the European exascale supercomputer. In parallel, as part of our long-term strategy, we are starting to build foundations for our future European IP toolbox based on a variety of IP solutions including RISC-V, which will target custom accelerators and microprocessors.  Our ambitious vision should begin to show concrete results with first-generation processors by SiPearl in the field by 2022. The first EPI Forum, much like the project itself with its strategy of supplying products in the short term and achieving EU sovereignty in the long term, will allow attendees to become acquainted with how those short- and long-term ambitions are tightly articulated,” stated Jean-Marc Denis, EPI Chairman of the Board.

“There is demand for the type of performance and innovation that Arm Neoverse-based processors deliver, and this is evident in the growth of the Arm HPC ecosystem,” said Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm.  “Our collaboration with the EPI and SiPearl is strategically important to our goals in HPC, and Arm supports the EU on its road toward greater processor independence and exascale deployments.”

“As the European number one in High-Performance Computing, Atos is fully supportive of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s ambitious strategy to boost European technological self-reliance. Atos is proud to lead the effort to design a family of European processors for HPC and for other emerging markets, in our role of coordinator of the EPI project. Atos has a long history of commitment to the development of the Arm ecosystem for HPC, particularly through our role in the pioneering Mont-Blanc projects. With EPI, we are taking this ambition to a different scale, and this is good news for the robustness of the European industry,” said Arnaud Bertrand, Senior Vice President, Global Head of BDS Strategy, Innovation and R&D at Atos.

“HPE has been a strong supporter of the Arm ecosystem with both our Apollo and Cray systems and software for HPC and AI and we are excited to partner with SiPearl and the EPI consortium,” said Peter Ungaro, senior vice president and general manager, High-Performance Computing and Mission Critical Solutions, HPE. “As the leader of the global hybrid IT and HPC markets, HPE is uniquely positioned to leverage and distribute SiPearl processors on future systems to customers around the world.”

“The future of computing is dramatically changing, driven by the digitalization of many industries as compute workloads change with the arrival of big data,” said Ravi Subramanian, senior vice-president at Mentor, a Siemens Business. “The European Processor Initiative is the most significant pan-European initiative in computing over the past two decades. Mentor is excited to participate in and contribute to this initiative by bringing key experts together in Paris for the first EPI Forum to help chart the future of the entire EPI ecosystem.”

“As a key partner to the European Processor Initiative, we are proud that our solutions contribute toward the creation of state-of-the-art high-performance computing processor technologies designed in Europe, “ said Luc Elman, VP Customer Excellence Europe at Synopsys.”

“GENCI as a French actor of the HPC-driven and AI-driven simulation activities in science is very proud to participate and support the EPI initiative which will achieve a major contribution to the European sovereign digital revolution supported by co-designed exascale systems funded by EuroHPC,” said Philippe Lavocat, President and CEO of GENCI.

Event details and registration is available at https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/epi-forum/.