Speakers
Description
In pursuit of energy-efficient solutions for computing in High Energy Physics (HEP) we have extended our investigations of non-x86 architectures beyond the ARM platforms that we have previously studied. In this work, we have taken a first look at the RISC-V architecture for HEP workloads, leveraging advancements in both hardware and software maturity.
We introduce the Pioneer Milk-V, a 64-core RISC-V machine running Fedora Linux, as our new testbed, available at ScotGrid Glasgow (UK) and INFN Bologna (Italy). Despite this early stage of RISC-V adoption in HEP, significant progress has been made in software compatibility. Standard frameworks such as ROOT, Geant4, CVMFS, and XRootD can be successfully built and run on the RISC-V platform, showcasing the evolving ecosystem. Additionally, efforts are underway to port CMSSW, promising further integration of HEP experiment software.
In this first study, we assess performance and power efficiency, and we leverage various benchmarking tools to compare the RISC-V system with existing ARM and x86 architectures. Although it is not yet possible to run the HEPScore suite, we have conducted ROOT tests and benchmarks, along with DB12 and HS06 benchmarks, demonstrating promising performance-per-watt on the RISC-V platform.
These early results suggest that RISC-V architecture holds potential for advancing energy-efficient computing in HEP, offering decent performance and significantly better power efficiency, while contributing to an increasingly heterogeneous computing landscape.
