Ambition

The HIGHER project will develop the first European energy-efficient OCP-compliant modules utilized in cloud and edge infrastructure, empowering a real pre-production architecture, developed, among others, on top of the outcomes of the EPI and EUPilot projects.


State-of-the-Art and beyond

OCP is an open source standard for data centers, which rapidly managed to attract hundreds of international institutions, including universities, research institutions and companies worldwide, that consistently contribute to its design, implementation, and worldwide adoption. The HIGHER project will deliver several novel features at different levels. Expand the topics below to understand the current state of the art and the main advances we are aiming to achieve during the project. 

Numerous research challenges in energy efficiency persist and pose significant barriers to the advancement of forthcoming computing and communication systems. Critical energy efficiency concerns within cloud and edge computing encompass stringent energy limitations, inadequate power efficiency, and elevated energy consumption per unit. 

Beyond the SOTA: HIGHER employs a large number of interconnected low-power components that are usually found in edge devices without sacrificing performance since the HIGHER architecture matches the needs of today’s cloud and edge applications, which expose a lot of parallelism by utilising a large number of scale-out resources instead of a small number of centralised scale-up resources. Specifically, HIGHER will deploy three energy-efficient processor chips: a) The SiPearl RHEA 2, an ARM-based SoC meticulously designed to optimise performance while significantly reducing energy consumption, thus aligning with the imperative to reduce carbon footprint. RHEA 2 processors are engineered with energy efficiency as a core focus, utilising minimal power to execute computational tasks and thereby diminishing energy consumption associated with cloud-based workloads. b) Additionally, two RISC-V processor chips will be utilised: the EPAC from EPI and the EUPILOT chip. These chips leverage power gating technology exclusively to notably enhance energy efficiency by gating the system clock to many internal blocks when not in use. Moreover, memory optimisation strategies, including meticulous analysis of macro ratio implementation and the integration of custom latch-based RF’s, substantially decrease power consumption. The specifications of these chips will also allow for the establishment of a European open standard for processor sockets.

Hyperconvergence integrates compute, storage, networking, and virtualisation resources into a single unified software-defined platform. HIGHER embraces its benefits, coupled with OCP server standards, with respect to datacenter management effectiveness and flexibility. Moreover, HIGHER will support dynamic coherent memory pool management over high-speed network links. HIGHER will utilise Compute Express Link (CXL) industry-standard solutions to enable low-latency high-throughput communication between host CPUs and remote memory devices at rack level, allowing cloud memory-demanding applications to access a unified global address space. 

Beyond the SOTA: Academia and industry started focusing on the CXL technology to leverage disaggregated computing with low-latency coherent access of remote resources (e.g. accelerators, NUMA memories). HIGHER will enable CXL-based communication between the datacenter hardware modules within the final modular integrated platform, allowing the management module to dynamically  allocate coherent memory regions of different sizes. Moreover, HIGHER will offer hardware security extensions that enable memory isolation fro sensitive datasets of workloads that require elevated system security safeguards.

Current-generation OCP systems are not capable to fully utilise available rack-level resources, and are commonly configured as a set of homogeneous independent servers with relatively low-bandwidth connectivity thus limiting their flexibility and efficiency.

Beyond the SOTA: The OCP servers developed in HIGHER incorperate a novel combination of heterogeneous processor modules (ARM, RISC-V) with multi-level connectivity capabilities that enable (i) high performance communication and coordination for cloud/edge workloads and services (utilising advance NoCs, CXL 3.0 for cross-server connectivity and OCP NIC 3.0 Ethernet adapters), and (ii) novel energy-efficient utilisation of memory and storage resources at the rack level.

All current EU initiatives (e.g. EPI and EUPilot) are working towards developing HPC servers, whereas one aiming as cloud computing (RISER) mainly implements European cloud accelerator modules. Thus, there is a lack of an initiative that will develop a heterogeneous cloud/edge infrastructure utilising only European components. 

Beyond the SOTA: European technologies will be developed and utilised comprehensively  from the top of the software stack to the hardware platform and processors. This infrastructure will feature open hardware and software, developed and integrated collaboratively, where the end product is greater than the sum of its parts, thanks to easily shareable IP developed within HIGHER. Every aspect of the project, from device drivers and boot firmware to Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design, FPGA design, hardware interfaces, and processors, will be completely developed and owned by European entities. Perhaps the only technology in the project sources externally will be CAD/EDA tools; however, the impact will be minimal since these products will only be used as external tools rather than being developed or modified. The board form factors and interfaces will adhere to open standards to facilitate easy use in other environments. The HIGHER platforms will be open so that users outside the project, including partners from contemporary projects, can access them easily. Thus, HIGHER will make foundational contributions to an all-European cloud/edge services ecosystem.

Over the last few years there has been a tremendous technology improvement in cloud and edge computing to address the demanding needs of today’s applications and users. Although such technologies have managed to improve productivity dramatically, they are extremely demanding in terms of resources, including CPU, memory, network throughput, and even I/O. Those have been shown to be able to leverage the huge computing power of different classes of CPUs and accelerators, but not yet adequately on ARM platforms and even less on RISC-V. 

Beyond the SOTA: In the project, we will provide advanced infrastructures based on European technologies, that will enable a broad class of cloud and edge technologies to be efficiently deployed on the HIGHER ARM and RISC-V processor modules in one or more racks of OCP servers. HIGHER will contribute to the maturation of ARM systems for Cloud/Edge services, and also to demonstrate RISC-V as a competitive alternative in those domains. We will develop the necessary open-source firmware and the I/O device drivers, and port popular cloud software stacks so that the platforms can be used efficiently by cloud providers and users.

Project objectives

The main objectives of the HIGHER project will be implemented through specific hardware and software components that will be developed within the project. Each component is realisable given existing and near-future high-end technology and the available expertise in the consortium. For each component, HIGHER will also make use of results from previous work of the partners (e.g. EPAC and RHEA2 processor chips from EPI, Kubernetes on RISC-V, etc.) as well as open-source architectures and open standards used in the cloud and edge. For these reasons, the consortium is confident that i) HIGHER will be a key solution towards harnessing the collective power of resources spread across the computing continuum and ii) HIGHER is realistically achievable within the timeframe of the project.   

HIGHER will deliver and advanced-stage modular architecture for cloud and edge services, leveraging European technologies and adhering to OCP standards. Within this framework, HIGHER will showcase three on-site deployments of its architecture, that will be evaluated through four distinct use cases. Additionally, HIGHER will offer a user-friendly, fully-featured Linux distribution and compoute environment for easy deployment.

Energy efficiency is a main tenet of the HIGHER architecture. Based on energy-efficient ARM and RISC-V SoCs from EPI and EUPilot, high-bandwidth, low-latency NoCs (CMN NoC family for the ARM SoCs, and EXTOLL’s SerDes and low-latency Chip-to-Chip interconnect for the RISC-V SoCs), and corresponding energy-efficient memory technologies, the processor modules to be developed within HIGHER will provide an energy efficient architecture. In parallel, the out-of-order multi-core CPUs along with the vector units from EPI and EUPilot projects will provide the required performance for executing Clou-Edge and ML/AI workloads. 

HIGHER aims to develop and validate comprehensive open-source designs for standardised form-factor system platforms, tailored to support cloud edge services and applications. This effort will encompass the creation of necessary low-level firmware and systems software. The outcomes of HIGHER will be shared with RISC-V International, including both the Hardware and Software Horizontal Committees, and the OCP community and workgroups. Interested parties from academia and industry will have access for evaluation and potential adoption. Additionally, HIGHER prototypes, integrated with a representative Linux-based software stack for cloud services support, will be presented to perminent cloud computing industry associations such as the Cloud Industry Forum.

The dissemination and exploitation plans of HIGHER are guided by four pillars: Readiness (relatively high TRL of results), Open-source, Openness (open access of results), and sustainability post-project. Project results will be disseminated through national and international activities, targeting academics and companies to promote the HIGHER vision for future heterogeneous cloud and edge services. HIGHER offers a full-stack solution encompassing hardware platforms and systems software. Open-source components facilitate widespread adoption of project results, while the Open Access Platformm Programme enables users to leverage HIGHER platforms for their own cloud applications. This task also provides access to interested partners, including those from contemporary projects within the same proposal call.