European Commission dangles €374m for low-power exascale research

Europe is trying to plant a flag in future chip development, slinging money towards low-power server silicon. Through its Horizon 2020 research collaboration, the European Commission pus published a solicitation for the project. There's nearly €375m on offer for the project, which looks to push more digitisation “outside the …

[Ole Juul]

I'm looking forward to

A new generation of micro boards. Perhaps a Raspberry Crumb.

[Buzzword]

€375m

That's an awful lot of money chasing a trendy topic. What metrics, if any, are they using to determine whether the money is well-spent?

[analyzer]

Re: €375m

This is Europe, they don't really account for anything, they just sign off the main accounts and say there are errors that the plebs have to put up with.

Warning, that's a PDF :-P

[Lars]

Re: €375m

Stop bothering about the EU, soon you are out, and the UK will finally be able to tenfold that and "happy days are here again" on no trendy topics and all well spent. And if not you will have to ask what yards, if any, the used.

[Anonymous Coward]

"... the European Commission pus ..."

That's not a very nice way to talk about them!

[Chris Evans]

ARM?

I wonder if ARM will apply?

IIRC they do have one design centre on the continent!

[John Smith 19]

I was wondering 264 submissions

263 ARM based?

Actually the SPARC architecture has been licensed in Europe for rad hard and space apps.

In truth the smart thing to do is go clockless but that means you can't sell premium high clock speed chips.

Tough elements will be identify power hungry instructions (in existing ISA) and a low power interconnect for them at both board and rack level. What makes some instructions power hungry, and then either make the less power hungry or scrap them.

It's ironic that GNU and Linux, developed essentially in an instruction set monoculture, allow nearly any possible instruction set to leverage a large development environment, once you've hacked a code generator.

IIRC DARPA was doing something like this. Something about 1 PetaFLOPS for 5Kw?