As 1 of the most important driving forces at the rear of the RISC-V architecture, SiFive tends to introduce and showcase RISC-V solutions not available from anyone else in the sector. This week the company shown the industry’s to start with RISC-V cluster that could be employed for substantial-general performance computing.
The 4-way cluster created by AB Open is centered on four SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer motherboards each and every that includes a Flexibility U740 system-on-chip for compute responsibilities as nicely as a SiFive HiFive1 Rev. B growth board delivering handle of 4 relays utilized to electric power on/off the 4 boards. Each HiFive Unmatched motherboard with the Independence U740 SoC is an person system that can run high-stage running systems and is geared up with PCIe 3. x8/16 and M.2 slots as very well as GbE and USB ports.
The Flexibility U740 SoC scarcely features good overall performance for present day HPC apps, but SiFive has the capacity to build SoCs with up to 128 high-effectiveness cores. Businesses that are interested in coming up with or utilizing such processors have to have to ensure that they have appropriate software package for RISC-V, and these boards need to enable push the development of such apps.
Due to the fact the intention was to create a reasonably powerful rackmount process with many RISC-V processors (which were being under no circumstances intended to assist symmetric multiprocessor technology) and hassle-free controls, an added motherboard for controls was desired. That board is connected to a PSU and manages the electric power distribution to lovers and offer sequencing for the HiFive Unmatched boards, just about every of which is related to an particular person Pico-ATX power source. Also, the manage board connects every single GbE port, as a result enabling their distant control.
AB Open up and SiFive say that the cluster can be utilised for standard facts middle or place of work workloads, but its major objective is to help program improvement and screening. Individuals who want to try utilizing RISC-V for HPC purposes can use various clusters to construct farms and acquire edge of many RISC-V cores.