Faced with the growing market demand for cloud services, with efficient, flexible, scalable and fast technologies, the RISC-V technology is an excellent option to lead the next generation of processors and cloud services. It is an alternative platform to current processors, adaptable to a wide variety of applications in different execution environments, from the devices of the Internet of Things (IoT) to large computing centres. RISC-V processors also allow customisation and improve processor performance by adapting it to the needs of users. Altogether, this technology is very attractive to companies as it offers greater flexibility, efficiency and security for cloud services, without having to purchase and maintain hardware and software.

In recent years, the progress and development of the RISC-V technology has been supported by leading tech companies and the scientific community, which works to develop new software, tools and hardware. Within this context, the European project Vitamin-V was launched, led by professors Beatriz Otero and Ramon Canal from the Department of Computer Architecture of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya - BarcelonaTech (UPC).

A platform to simplify and automatise
Vitamin-V is a project driven by a consortium of eight European partners from academia and industry that focuses on developing and validating a virtual execution environment and a set of tools that allow implementing and testing the reliability of software based on RISC-V technology for cloud services. Thus, Vitamin-V will develop open-source software distributions for a variety of applications, including Apache Spark, Kubernetes, Tensorflow and RustVMM. By doing so, it will produce a pioneering platform, both hardware and software, which will simplify and automatise the development of such applications.

The project started in January 2023 and has received 4.63 million euros in funding from the EU’s Horizon Europe programme as part of the call for digital and emerging technologies for competitiveness and fit for the green deal.

The other consortium partners are the Barcelona Supercomputing Center–Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), the universities Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece), the research centre Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (Greece) and companies Semidynamics (Spain), Virtual Open Systems (France), Zeropoint (Sweden) and Exascale Performance System (Greece).