The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), headquarters of the MareNostrum supercomputer, and IBM have announced an initiative called Future of Computing to develop high-performance chips with European technology. The aim is to get new processors that are more efficient with less energy consumption, which will contribute to reducing the technological dependence of the European Union on North American and Asian companies, which dominate this market.
One of the parts of the agreement includes an investment by the company IBM of three million euros in scholarships for education and research. The new processors will be designed with the RISC-V open source standard and will be mainly intended for what is known as high-performance computing (HPC, for its acronym in English). The agreement was signed by the director of the BSC, Mateo Valero, and by the president of IBM Spain, Portugal, Greece and Israel, Horacio Morell, at the RISC-V summit, which brings together Spanish universities in Barcelona.
The director of the BSC explains that, in the chip industry, "what we have now are the owners of the distribution game, such as Intel, AMD and Nvidia. Competition happens between these few companies. This implies that there is little chance of competing. Now, curiously, rules are being established that make things open, and there will be much more competition that will improve everything." Alberto García, chief engineer of IBM's Quantum community, seconded the appreciation and pointed out that "IBM is very willing to support European technologies that are generated here". " RISC-V - he observes - is an open standard that will allow not only proprietary companies to make chips, but anyone to access them. Opening the chip market will allow more competitiveness, will allow the price of chips to be reduced, that there will be a lot of availability and will allow the technological sovereignty of Europe".
Valero says that IBM “has always tried to create wealth here. In this particular case, they are helping Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain really create high-quality jobs". At the same time, the BSC is coordinating all Spanish universities to teach RISC-V. "This has never happened at a Spanish university: preparing girls and boys who can really change the world. Chips are what dominate the world and now there will be the possibility of making many of them, optimized for certain things, and for Spanish engineers to have as good jobs here as abroad. It's another part of the agreement that will help all this, and I'm very happy", he says.
Valero clarifies that "the chips that supercomputers carry are the fastest in the world, but at the same time they are used for other things". Among others, artificial intelligence, which has exploded once it has been introduced in supercomputers, but also in uses such as autonomous cars. The director of the BSC warns that the work is not left only to the processors themselves, because one of the objectives is that they have "an associated software" to achieve the minimum possible consumption. "It's no use building a 300-story skyscraper if people don't get into it afterwards. It must be a code design. We learned this from IBM", he says.
The result of the research will have a transfer to industry. García points out that the goal of this research "is not only the development of local talent, but also to transfer everything we can research to industry, because the link between research entities and industry sometimes remains a little Lost".
