Vitamin-V is a 2023-2025 Horizon Europe project that aims to develop a complete RISC-V open-source software stack for cloud services with comparable performance to the cloud-dominant x86 counterpart and a powerful virtual execution environment for software development, validation, verification, and test that considers the relevant RISC-V ISA extensions for cloud deployment

A. Arelakis

A. Call

A. Rigo

A. Savino

A. Scionti

A. Torregrosa

B. Otero

D. Gizopoulos

D. Pnevmatikatos

D. Raho

E. Rodríguez

F. Lubrano

G. Papadimitriou

I. Papaefstathiou

J. Costa

J. L. Berral

J. M. Arnau

K. Nikas

N. Tampouratzis

R. Canal

S. Di Carlo

V. Karakostas

Y. Nikolakopoulos

English

E. Rodríguez

PORTO@iris (Publications Open Repository TOrino - Politecnico di Torino)

17 October 2023POLITECNICO DI TORINORepository ISTITUZIONALEVitamin-V: Virtual Environment and Tool-boxing for Trustworthy Development of RISC-V based Cloud Services /Arelakis, A.; Arnau, J. M.; Berral, J. L.; Call, A.; Canal, R.; Di Carlo, S.; Costa, J.; Gizopoulos, D.; Karakostas, V.;Lubrano, F.; Nikas, K.; Nikolakopoulos, Y.; Otero, B.; Papadimitriou, G.; Papaefstathiou, I.; Pnevmatikatos, D.; Raho, D.;Rigo, A.; Rodríguez, E.; Savino, A.; Scionti, A.; Tampouratzis, N.; Torregrosa, A.. - ELETTRONICO. - (2023), pp. 1-3.(Intervento presentato al convegno RISC-V Summit Europe tenutosi a Barcelona, Spain nel 5-9th June 2023)[10.48550/arXiv.2305.10982].OriginalVitamin-V: Virtual Environment and Tool-boxing for Trustworthy Development of RISC-V based CloudServicesPublisher:PublishedDOI:10.48550/arXiv.2305.10982Terms of use:Publisher copyright(Article begins on next page)This article is made available under terms and conditions as specified in the  corresponding bibliographic description inthe repositoryAvailability:This version is available at: 11583/2981400 since: 2023-08-30T11:37:05ZRISC-V InternationalVitamin-V: Virtual Environment and Tool-boxingfor Trustworthy Development of RISC-V basedCloud ServicesA. Arelakis9, J.M. Arnau7, J. L. Berral5,10, A. Call5,R. Canal10∗, S. Di Carlo1,J. Costa10, D. Gizopoulos2, V. Karakostas2, F. Lubrano4, K. Nikas6, Y. Nikolakopoulos9,B. Otero 10, G. Papadimitriou2, I. Papaefstathiou3, D. Pnevmatikatos6, D. Raho 8,A. Rigo 8, E. Rodríguez10, A. Savino1, A. Scionti4, N. Tampouratzis3, A. Torregrosa71Politecnico di Torino, Italy; 2University of Athens, Greece; 3Exapsys, Greece; 4LINKS Foundation, Italy; 5BarcelonaSupercomputing Center, Spain; 6Institute of Communication & Computer Systems, Greece; 7Semidynamics, Spain; 8Virtual OpenSystems, France; 9ZeroPoint Technologies AB, Sweden; 10Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, SpainAbstractVitamin-V is a 2023-2025 Horizon Europe project that aims to develop a complete RISC-V open-source softwarestack for cloud services with comparable performance to the cloud-dominant x86 counterpart and a powerfulvirtual execution environment for software development, validation, verification, and test that considers therelevant RISC-V ISA extensions for cloud deployment.IntroductionRISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture(ISA) designed to be simple, modular, and extensible[1]. RISC-V processors offer advantages over propri-etary processor architectures, including open stan-dards, customizable designs, and lower licensing costs[2]. Yet, some challenges must be addressed beforeRISC-V can be widely adopted for cloud applications.Ecosystem maturity: while RISC-V has gainedsignificant momentum in recent years, the ecosystemaround RISC-V processors is still developing. Thisincludes hardware and software tools and the numberof vendors and support services available.Performance: while RISC-V processors can offergood performance, they may not yet be able to matchthe performance of more established architectures likex86 or ARM in specific applications. This can bea barrier to adoption in performance-sensitive cloudapplications.Compatibility: many cloud applications are de-signed to run on x86 or ARM architectures and mightnot be compatible with RISC-V processors. This canlimit the use of RISC-V in specific cloud environments.Security: as RISC-V processors become morewidely adopted, they may become a target for securityattacks. Ensuring the security of RISC-V-based cloudapplications will be an important challenge.∗Corresponding author: ramon.canal@upc.eduFunded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressedare, however, those of the authors only and do not necessarilyreflect those of the European Union or the HaDEA. Neitherthe European Union nor the granting authority can be heldresponsible for them. Project number: 101093062Standardization: while RISC-V is an open stan-dard, there is still a need for further standardization inareas such as memory management and I/O interfaces.This can lead to compatibility issues between differentRISC-V implementations and limit the portability ofRISC-V-based cloud applications.Vitamin-V operates in this context and tries to ad-dress these challenges by deploying a complete RISC-Vhardware-software stack for cloud services based oncutting-edge cloud open-source technologies for RISC-V cores, focusing on EPI cores. Vitamin-V incorpo-rates an innovative RISC-V virtual execution environ-ment providing hardware emulation, simulation, andFPGA prototyping to enable software development,verification, and validation before actual hardware isreleased. Vitamin-V also contributes to porting thecomplete cross-compiling toolchain, software stack,and essential application libraries for the forthcomingrelease of the RISC-V EPI processors [3, 4].Concept and MethodologiesAs depicted in Figure 1, Vitamin-V aims to develop acomplete RISC-V cloud software stack with compara-ble performance to the cloud-dominant x86 counter-part.The unavailability of full-fledged RISC-V systemsposes a significant challenge for porting and evalu-ating cutting-edge cloud setups and software stacks.Commercial cloud systems use hardware features par-tially available in RISC-V virtual environments andcommercial hardware cores. These features includevirtualization, cryptography, and vector extensions.RISC-V Summit Europe, Barcelona, 5-9th June 2023 1Cloud stacks demonstratedClassical cloudVRISC-VOpenStackTensorflow/SparkServerless cloudVRISC-VKubernetes+KataOpenFaas/KnativeModern cloudVRISC-VKubernetesTensorflow/SparkEPI RISC-V core extended with cloud-relevant ISAEPI memory compression and interconnect OS supportV-RISCV — Virtual execution environment  with cloud-relevant RISC-V ISARISC-V compiler and toolchain with cloud-relevant ISA supportVMM and cloud management stack port to RISC-VAI and BigData frameworks ported to RISC-VVITAMIN-V Concept and technologiesFigure 1: VITAMIN-V concept and architectureOne of the primary goals of Vitamin-V is to overcomethis challenge by building the Vitamin RISC-V vir-tual execution environment (VRISC-V). VRISC-V isa complete advanced multi-layered high-performanceRISC-V virtual environment based on three cutting-edge technologies: functional emulation (QEMU [5]),cycle-accurate simulation (gem5) [6], and an FPGA-based hardware prototype system node capable of run-ning using AWS EC2 F1 FPGAs (and thus scalable to100s of nodes)(FPGA [7]). Every technology providesunique features that are important during softwaredevelopment, validation, verification, and testing, tofavor RISC-V adoption by software developers. WithQEMU and the RISC-V on FPGA, the project aimsat simulating multi-node systems with more than 100cores. The goal is to simulate multi-node systems ingem5 with cycle-accurate accuracy and microarchitec-tural configuration flexibility.Besides the RISC-V main CPUs, EPI also developsaccelerators that are especially interesting for cloudsetups, including one for memory compression. Conse-quently, Vitamin-V will support such accelerators inthe VRISC-V virtual execution environment.Vitamin-V will fully support rapid software develop-ment in new RISC-V hardware setups. It will providea mature compiler toolchain based on LLVM to handlethe complete RISC-V ISA, including its extensions.Moreover, the project will develop a validation, veri-fication, and testing (VVT) toolset for developers toidentify software bugs and illegal or malicious codesequences, thus favoring software layers’ trustworthi-ness in future RISC-V systems. VVT tools will usethe VRISC-V platform to foster software porting andprototyping before mature hardware is released andavailable. This is crucial to favor the migration towardnew RISC-V servers in the cloud.Vitamin-V will port all necessary machine-dependent modules in relevant open-source cloud soft-ware distributions to enable the execution of com-plete cloud stacks on the VRISC-V virtual execu-tion environment. Targeted modules include supportfor running entire Virtual Machines (VMs), contain-ers, and lightweight VMs (KVM, QEMU, Docker,RustVMM), safety-security trusted execution environ-ments (VOSySMonitoRV), cloud management software(OpenStack, Kubernetes, Kata Containers), and AIand Big Data libraries (Tensorflow, Spark).Vitamin-V will address a classic cloud stack thattargets the execution of entire VMs managed byOpenStack, a modern cloud setup that targets en-tire VMs and containers managed by Kubernetes, anda serverless cloud stack that targets the execution oflightweight VMs managed by Kubernetes with KataContainers.To demonstrate the three working cloud setups, theywill be benchmarked against relevant AI applications(i.e., Google Net, ResBet, VGG19), Big-Data applica-tions (TPC-DS on top of Apache Spark), and Server-less applications (FunctionBench, ServerlessBench).Vitamin-V aims to match the software performance ofits x86 equivalent (x86 is the dominant ISA in cloudservers). Given the limited availability of RISC-Vhardware, measures will be averaged by resorting tothe CPU core mark scores to achieve a fair assessment.Overall, such development guarantees a RISC-V cloud-stack ecosystem for market take-up.ConclusionsCultivating a new era of open and collaborative com-puting, integrating RISC-V in cloud computing rep-resents a crucial opportunity to revolutionize the in-dustry with its unparalleled flexibility, efficiency, andscalability. Vitamin-V aims to play a crucial role inthis challenging revolution.References[1] Andrew Waterman et al. The RISC-V Instruction SetManual Volume II: Privileged Architecture Version 1.9.Tech. rep. EECS Department, University of California,Berkeley, 2016.[2] Samuel Greengard. “Will RISC-V revolutionize computing?”In: Communications of the ACM 63.5 (2020), pp. 30–32.[3] European Processor Initiative. https://www.european-processor-initiative.eu/. Accessed: 2023-03-17.[4] Mario Kovač. “European Processor Initiative: The Indus-trial Cornerstone of EuroHPC for Exascale Era”. In: Pro-ceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference onComputing Frontiers. Alghero, Italy, 2019, p. 319.[5] RISCV-QEMU. https://github.com/riscv/riscv-qemu.Accessed: 2023-03-17.[6] gem5. https://github.com/gem5/gem5. Accessed: 2023-03-17.[7] Amazon F1. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/. Accessed: 2023-03-17.2 RISC-V Summit Europe, Barcelona, 5-9th June 2023

Vitamin-V: Virtual Environment and Tool-boxing for Trustworthy Development of RISC-V based Cloud Services

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Vitamin-V: Virtual Environment and Tool-boxing for Trustworthy Development of RISC-V based Cloud Services

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