Experiences of running an HPC RISC-V testbed

TL;DR

This paper reports on the setup, experiences, and lessons learned from establishing a RISC-V testbed for high-performance computing, aiming to assess RISC-V's suitability for scientific workloads.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed account of deploying a RISC-V HPC testbed, highlighting practical challenges and insights for future RISC-V HPC development.

Findings

Identified key challenges in RISC-V HPC deployment

Gained insights into RISC-V's performance for scientific workloads

Provided recommendations for future RISC-V HPC efforts

Abstract

Funded by the UK ExCALIBUR H\&ES exascale programme, in early 2022 a RISC-V testbed for HPC was stood up to provide free access for scientific software developers to experiment with RISC-V for their workloads. Here we report on successes, challenges, and lessons learnt from this activity with a view to better understanding the suitability of RISC-V for HPC and important areas to focus RISC-V HPC community efforts upon.