RISER

RISER (RISC-V for cloud services)

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 aims to develop and validate open-source designs for standardized form-factor system platforms suitable for supporting cloud services and deploying cloud applications. RISER plans to play a leading role in enabling the path towards a European-based cloud infrastructure and towards the first RISC-V cloud architecture using the technology being developed within the EPI and EUPilot projects. We aim for RISER to be the technological enabler for larger EU initiatives.

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.

• The Hardware Platforms layer, which includes an FPGA-based emulation infrastructure, a PCIe accelerator and a microserver.
• The System Software layer, which includes the required software infrastructure for booting and controlling the hardware, accessing the hardware peripherals and providing the execution environment for the cloud applications and services.
• The Use Cases layer, which includes the three use cases that will be used for the evaluation of the RISER platforms. RISER has a direct exploitation path to the contemporary proposals in the call, named “VITAMIN-V”, “AERO” and “OpenCUBE”, and we will design the RISER architecture with that in mind.

Project info

Coordinator : Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH)
Call & reference : HORIZON-CL4-2022-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01-26 – Open source for cloud-based services (RIA)
Starting date : 01/01/2023
Duration : 36 Months
Status : Running