The RISER Project
RISER: RISC-V for cloud services
Overview
RISER will develop the first all-European RISC-V cloud server infrastructure, significantly enhancing Europe’s open strategic autonomy. RISER will leverage and validate open hardware high-speed interfaces combined with a fully-featured operating system environment and runtime system, enabling the integration of low-power components, including RISC-V processor chips from the EPI and EUPILOT projects, in a novel energy-efficient cloud architecture. RISER brings together 7 partners from industry and academia to jointly develop and validate open-source designs for standardized form-factor system platforms, suitable for supporting cloud services.
Specifically, RISER will build two cloud-focused platforms:
1. An accelerator platform, which includes the Arm RHEA SoC from EPI and a PCIe acceleration board to be developed within the project which will integrate up-to four RISC-V based chips from EUPILOT.
2. A microserver platform, interconnecting up to ten microserver boards all developed by the project, each one supporting up to four RISC-V chips coupled with high-speed storage and networking. Embracing hyperconvergence, our microserver architecture allows for distributed storage and memory to be used by any processor in the system with low overhead. The open-source system board designs of RISER will be accompanied by open-source low-level firmware and systems software, and a representative Linux-based software stack to support cloud services, facilitating uptake and enhancing the commercialization path of project results.
Acceleration of compute workloads
Networked object and key-value storage
Containerized execution as part of a provider-managed IaaS environment.
Challenges to address
C1
There is still no European cloud computing infrastructure to compete with the non-EU cloud giants. AWS (47.8%), Azure (15.5%) and Google Cloud (4%), as well as China’s Alibaba (7.7%) share the global market with no major European presence, while USA and Asian cloud providers such as Amazon and Alibaba are making huge investments to stay ahead of the game in the EU cloud area.
C2
Another important challenge is the lack of European autonomy, data sovereignty and selfdetermination arising from the lack of an All-European cloud infrastructure. Industry players in Europe want to avoid ending up in arrangements, which will make it difficult for them to process and extract value from the data they produce. At the same time, most European companies on the cloud can’t afford to switch from a non-EU hyperscaler to an EU cloud provider if their options aren’t highly functional and/or financially viable. European know-how on cloud technologies is unfortunately dispersed.
C3
Given the perpetual surging of cloud technologies and demands, energy consumption of cloud data centers with their related CO2 emissions is shaping up to be a major issue in the near future. Data centers account for about 1% of the global electricity demand, and that’s forecast to rise to 3% to 8% in the next decade.
Riser Architecture
The RISER architecture is organized into three main logical layers and related Work Packages to deliver an all-European open source and open standard based software and hardware integrated system.
