The Chinese Shandong University has been utilizing a high-performance server cluster with RISC-V cores for approximately a month. This was reported by HPC Wire, citing a presentation at the RISC-V Summit. The system consists of 48 nodes of RISC-V CPUs, each with 64 cores, totaling 3,072 cores. According to David Chen of Alibaba, it is the first commercial RISC-V server cluster in a cloud environment.
While the system is primarily intended for academic purposes in research and education, it is also available for rent as an instance. Currently, major providers, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the United States, rely on x86 and ARM chips, and there is no public option to use RISC-V chips in a cloud environment. However, Chinese cloud providers like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are increasingly investing in RISC-V.
The foundation of Shandong University’s system is the Sophgos SG2042 chip, which offers over 64 MB of system cache and a 32x PCIe Gen4 external connection. The 64 CPU cores are Xuantie C920 from T-Head, a subsidiary of Alibaba, expanding on the previously introduced Xuantie C910 in 2019 by adding a vector unit. Details about the rest of the cluster’s structure, especially the interconnection of nodes, are not yet known.
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh’s Supercomputing Center (EPCC) tested the Sophgo SG2042 several weeks ago in Milk-V’s Pioneer workstation. The results, described in a scientific paper, indicate that RISC-V CPUs are currently not very competitive, at least compared to x86 chips. Even earlier Broadwell chips with only 18 cores outperform the SG2042. However, compared to other available RISC-V hardware, the Sophgo chip is sometimes significantly better.
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