European Processor Initiative

The European Processor Initiative (EPI) is one of the cornerstones of EU's HPC strategic plan - EuroHPC. Drawing on the expertise of 27 partners from 10 European countries, EPI aims to bring a low-power microprocessor to market. It will ensure that the key competence of high-end chip design remains in Europe, a critical point for many application areas. Thanks to such new European technologies, European scientists and industry will be able to access exceptional levels of energy-efficient computing performance. As recognized by high-level EU officials, EPI will benefit Europe's scientific leadership, industrial competitiveness, engineering skills and know-how – not to mention society as whole.EPI will use a holistic approach to refine the system architecture and its component specifications. All aspects of the solution, and their interactions, will be considered and tackled simultaneously, taking a co-design approach:• hardware platform architecture and components• system and runtime software (operating system, middleware, developers kit, libraries, etc.)• HPC end-user applicationsTo fulfill its objectives of working towards a hybrid exascale system, EPI will develop:• a novel, exascale HPC-focused low-power processing system unit• an accelerator to increase energy efficiency for computing intensive tasks in HPC and artificial intelligence (AI)• an automotive demonstration platform to test the relevance of the abovementioned components in this industry sectorEPI has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmer under grant agreement No 826647.