Last December 21, 2022, the final event of the DRAC community took place at the Campus Nord of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona. This event was organized by the DRAC coordinator, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and was attended by more than 100 participants. The event was structured in two parts, a first one with presentations about the project and a second one about the global vision of the sector. There was also a physical space for the exhibition of posters with the participation of more than 15 exhibitors who had the opportunity to present their work during the two breaks of the talks.
The first part of the event aimed to present the results obtained by the DRAC project partners, including BSC, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Universitat de Barcelona (UB), UPC and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). Professor Miquel Moretó (UPC/BSC), coordinator of the DRAC project, introduced the project and its objectives. Next, researcher César Hernandez (BSC) presented the characteristics of Lagarto Ka, the out-of-order processor developed in the first work package. Ramón Canal together with Juanjo Costa, both professors at UPC, presented the advances obtained in the field of virtualization, which together with the presentation on security by Professor Oriol Farràs from URV updated the progress of the second work package. Professor Santiago Marco-Sola (UAB) presented the characteristics of the accelerator dedicated to genomic alignment corresponding to the third work package. At the end, researcher Jordi Font (BSC/UPC) introduced another of the accelerators developed within the framework of the project, the automotive accelerator. Finally, Prof. Manel López (UB) presented the chips manufactured and ordered to be manufactured and the analog IPs of the fifth work package. To end this first part of the event, a demonstration of the first chip manufactured and tested in the project was presented. During the demonstration by Max Doblas (BSC) some tests were performed so that the public could see the characteristics of its operation.
The second part of the event focused on the community around DRAC, where some related projects were presented, as well as presentations of a more global nature. Among the speakers in this second part were Carles Hernandez (UPV) presenting the European project Selene, Alberto del Barrio (UCM) with his presentation on the improvement of Posits with respect to IEEE-754 in RISC-V, Ricardo Martinez (IMB-CNM) talking about a chemical sensor array specifically based on a RISC-V SoC for IoT, and Josep Lluís Berral (UPC) on the European project Vitamin-V, which proposes services and platforms in the cloud based on RISC-V. There were also presentations by Adrian Cristal and Osman Unsal (both BSC) on high-performance RISC-V vector accelerators and by John Davis (BSC) on the EU roadmap for RISC-V-based high-performance computing. This second part of the day continued with a panel discussion on the future of RISC-V in Europe in education, research and industry. Miquel Moretó (BSC/UPC), Carlos Hernandez (UPV), Lluis Teres (IMB-CNM) and Francesc Moll (UPC) participated in this round table. Finally, Mateo Valero, director of BSC, joined in sharing the strategy that BSC has adopted to continue collaborating with the community and jointly address the future challenges that lie ahead in the short and long term in the RISC-V field.
