BarcelonaThe Generalitat and the Spanish government announced last Friday the approval of three projects to place Catalonia – and by extension, Spain – at the forefront of the strategic chip industry. One of them is the DARE – for the acronym in English of HPC Digital Autonomy with RISC-V in Europe–, directed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center –Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS)– and which has an ambitious goal: to catapult the technological sovereignty of the European Union in an area so far deserted such as the development of high-performance chips ( HPC); key components to solve complex problems in areas such as health, the climate crisis or security. The director of the BSC-CNS, Mateo Valero, explains to the ARA all the details of the project.
Lead an essential project for Europe to gain weight in the chip industry in the face of American and Asian hegemony.
— We have been accumulating evidence for a long time to finance this project of which we are coordinators, but it will be a Catalan company, OpenChip [que és una empresa derivada del BSC] who will develop the chip. Universities don’t make components that can compete against Nvidia or Intel, companies have to do that. Thus, of the 71 million euros awarded, about 50 million are for OpenChip. In any case, we have fought a lot, because it has not been easy to get the project. Not so much for the technical part, but because some countries are envious that the largest European chip project is being carried out in Barcelona.
Envy in the political field?
— Yes, a little. The project has been delayed in the political sphere because there has been reluctance from some countries for the project to go ahead. We have to think that almost three years have passed since it was thought of and given the green light. Of course, more than 40 partners are also involved, it is the big high-performance chip project in Europe and moving the European machinery is not simple. At the inauguration of MareNostrum 5 last December, we asked the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, and the then president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, to make this possible and they told us that they would fully support the plan because the European chip was designed in Barcelona; it means that we have received the full support of both governments.
How will the project materialize?
— Three chips will be made, three designs designed for different markets and each led by a different company. One will be made by the aforementioned OpenChip, another by an Italian company called Axelera, and the third by a German company called Codasip. All three will design candidates to pursue the goal of, for the first time in the European Union, using European chips to manufacture their supercomputers. We are very excited for our Mare Nostrum 6, which will be ready in four years, to use them. That’s why this project is so important to us, because it’s a preliminary step because, if the chips turn out well, in two years we’ll be able to review and improve them again, do one more round and be able to incorporate them into our supercomputer This would be a great event on a European scale.
Would this be the first time this has happened?
— Europe neither designs nor manufactures high performance chips. I’m not just talking about chips for supercomputers, we also make the chips that will be needed by self-driving cars of the future, or those needed for, say, Extended Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. At first these chips will be designed for use in supercomputers, but later they must help us develop autonomous cars and systems that extend AI models. It will be a strategic sector for Europe.
The BSC has been working for years to create a European high-performance processor for supercomputers with the European Processor Initiative (PI). Can DARE be considered a continuation?
— The BSC has been the preacher that Europe had to make chips based on a RISC-V vector accelerator, which is an open-source instruction set and thus a kind of contract between software and hardware to run the code of the applications. In fact, we have been pursuing the idea that we should develop European processors for more than a decade, and for a long time we worked with ARM and did several projects called Mont-Blanc. When we were on the verge of achieving it, however, the company was bought by Japan’s Softbank and we were left with no alternative. Since then we coordinate all the projects based on this open architecture, the RISC-V, which is quite new, but with potential in the medium and long term and which has won the support of the academy for its versatility and its ability to adapt. DARE is one more step that we lead. If we hadn’t done it, it would mean that politically or technically we didn’t do something right. So yes, it is a continuation of the effort and work done.
He says there are many partners in this project. What funding do they receive?
— There are many, yes, about forty. This is the largest chip development project ever funded by the European community, there is no precedent. The main partners are Spain, Italy and Germany. Of the 240 million euros awarded in a first phase, the European Commission invests 120 through the EuroHPC [l’empresa comuna europea de computació d’alt rendiment]so the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities will put 34 million more.
At the moment, however, the project is based on the design of chips, but not on their manufacture.
— Over the next three years we will be in charge of coordinating the development of prototypes and we will conduct research with 14 million euros to propose the next generation of chips. This is where the third goal comes in, which is to evaluate the components to see if they are worth it or not for the Mare Nostrum 6. All the prototypes will be designed in Spain, Italy and Germany, but the chips will be manufactured in Taiwan. Specifically, in TSMC, the acronym for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited, which is a Taiwanese multinational company specializing in the manufacture and design of semiconductors to order and which is the best. It’s where chips for Apple and Nvidia are made.
