Europe’s home-grown processor
Europe consumes nearly 30% of the world’s supercomputing resources, only 5% of supercomputers are supplied in Europe and exactly 0% of the microprocessors powering them are designed here. That is something that the European Processor Initiative (EPI) is looking to change.
The European Processor Initiative is the EU's response to this strategic autonomy challenge. SiPearl is a private company which was created within the EPI. Located in France, Germany, and Spain, SiPearl designs the next energy-efficient microprocessor for HPC. And the subsequent generations of SiPearl microprocessors will power Europe’s data centres and cloud infrastructures.
The European Processor Initiative (EPI) is a 5-year ambitious large-scale European initiative aiming to develop critical low-power microprocessor technology. The EPI consortium brings together 23 partners from 10 European countries. The first phase started in December 2018 under Horizon 2020 with EUR 80 million of EU funding. The EuroHPC JU will support the second phase of EPI, as of 2020.
Considering the magnitude and importance of the European Processor Initiative, Evertiq has invited Thierry Lelégard, Head of platform security at SiPearl & EPI, to present the project during Evertiq Expo Sophia Antipolis on February 8, 2024.
During its first phase, the project designed a general-purpose processor chip called Rhea. A chip that is now being commercialised by SiPearl. Europe’s very first Exascale supercomputer, named JUPITER, is set to utilise the Rhea chip.
JUPITER is a EuroHPC JU supercomputing infrastructure that will be operated by Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. This is a major milestone for both SiPearl and EPI in fulfilling the mission and vision set out by the EU to ensure sovereignty through the return of high-performance, low-power processor technologies in Europe.
JUPITER will be composed of two partitions, a highly scalable GPU-accelerated Booster Module and a general-purpose Cluster Module with high memory bandwidth processors. The general-purpose Cluster Module will be based on SiPearl’s first-generation processor, Rhea1.
