To achieve these goals, SYCLOPS followed a structured approach made up of four phases: (i) Design and specification, (ii) Research, development, and early prototyping (iii) Scaling up, system enhancements, and complete platform, and (iv) Validation and exploitation.
During the first eighteen months of the project, the consortium first started with the first phase. Given that SYCLOPS involves work on a multi-layered hardware-software stack, the consortium defined clear interfaces between layers to ensure compatibility across layers. The use case partners also performed an analysis of their respective use cases and came up with a specification of benchmarking tools. The result of this work was summarized in deliverable “D2.1: Architecture, interface, and benchmark specification”.
The consortium then moved on to phase two of the project which consisted of three parallel design and implementation activities. At the infrastructure layer of SYCLOPS, we developed v1.0 of the SYCLOPS Edge Data Center (EDC), deployed it at EUR, made it available to all consortium partners, and used it as the basis of demonstrating integration at the interim stage. This platform was described in deliverable “D3.1: EMDC v1.0 with RISC-V platform release”. At the platform layer, the two compilers in SYCLOPS, DPC++ and AdaptiveCPP, were significantly updated to enable SYCL applications to be compiled to RISC-V backends among other functionalities. Consortium partners collaborated on using the oneAPI Construction Kit to enable SYCL kernel execution the RISC-V CPU and FPGA-based soft core. In order to demonstrate successful functioning, at the application level, SYCLDB—a library for hardware accelerated data analytics---was developed. SYCLDB was compiled with both compilers, and the performance of its kernels was evaluated on several backends available in the SYCLOPS EDC, thus demonstrating full integration across all layers of the stack. The result of this work was described in deliverable “D4.1: RISC-V Compiler Backends”. In addition to this work, significant progress has been made on all active tasks, and a detailed updated of per-task activity is provided later in the M18 periodic reporting document.
In summary, the project successfully submitted 9 out of 23 deliverables during the covered period as planned, including technical reports, prototypes, research findings, and dissemination and exploitation strategies. Additionally, 5 out of 10 milestones were achieved ending with the end-to-end verification of relevant parts of the SYCLOPS stack using the EDC V1.0.
