The American semiconductor company AMD has announced its collaboration with the French startup SiPearl with the aim of jointly building exascale-level supercomputing systems. Some systems that use the Rhea processor, -based on the high performance technology of SiPeals- and the AMD Instinct GPU accelerators.
These accelerators are based on AMD’s Radeon GPU technology. Also, they can be found among other systems like in Frontieran exascale supercomputer located at Oak Ridge Laboratories and already the fastest supercomputer in the world.
Despite its short life, since it was born in 2019, SiPearl has already signed alliances with other important partners in the sector such as NVidia, HPE, Graphcore or Intel. In addition, he also participates in the European EPI, that is to say the European Processor Initiative.
It is a consortium selected by the European Union whose purpose is to help in the development of a european microprocessor specifically for High Performance Computing (HPC) and also in emerging applications such as artificial intelligence. In fact, the goal of the EPI is to develop an Arm-based processor for an exascale supercomputer by 2023 and that will be manufactured by TSMC, using its N6, 6 nanometer class manufacturing process.
EPI also seeks to bring the old continent closer to technological independence, or at least to avoid a global monopoly in various sectors such as microchip manufacturing. A training that brings together 28 entities from 10 European countries.
This is how the collaboration between AMD and SiPearl will begin
One of the first steps for AMD and SiPearl will be to work on interoperability of AMD’s ROCm software stack with SiPearl’s Rhea microprocessor. ROCm is AMD’s software stack for developing GPU-accelerated applications.
A team effort that will begin by focusing on portability and optimization of AMD’s Heterogeneous Interface for Portability (HIP). Namely, AMD’s GPU programming environment that allows developers to write code that can run on AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
“By providing a broader choice for end-users of European supercomputers, it will enable Europe to tackle the great challenges of our time, such as artificial intelligence, climate modeling and medical research,” said SiPearl, Philippe Notton, CEO of SiPearl. .
