Abstract
The emerging RISC-V ecosystem has the potential to improve the speed, fidelity, and quality of hardware/software co-design R &D activities. However, the suitability of the RISC-V ecosystem for co-design targeting HPC use cases is not yet well understood. In this paper, we examine the performance of several HPC benchmark workloads running on simulated open-source hardware RISC-V cores running under the FireSim FPGA-accelerated simulation tool. To provide a realistic and reproducible HPC software stack, we port the Spack package manager to RISC-V and use it to build our workloads. Our key finding is that each of the RISC-V cores evaluated is capable of running complex HPC workloads executing for long durations under simulation, with simulation rates of approximately 1/50th real-time. Additionally we provide a baseline set of performance results that can be compared against in future studies. Our results highlight the readiness of the RISC-V ecosystem for performing open co-design activities for HPC. We expect performance to improve as co-design activities targeting RISC-V ramp up and the RISC-V community makes further contributions to this space.
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This paper describes objective technical results and analysis. Any subjective views or opinions that might be expressed in the paper do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Department of Energy or the United States Government.
This article has been authored by an employee of National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC under Contract No. DE-NA0003525 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The employee owns all right, title and interest in and to the article and is solely responsible for its contents. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this article or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan https://www.energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan.
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Berger-Vergiat, L. et al. (2023). Evaluation of HPC Workloads Running on Open-Source RISC-V Hardware. In: Bienz, A., Weiland, M., Baboulin, M., Kruse, C. (eds) High Performance Computing. ISC High Performance 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13999. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40843-4_40
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