A landmark event in the field of open architecture took place on November 11: the Barcelona supercomputer center announced the foundation of the LOCA laboratory. The name stands for Laboratory for Open Computer Architecture, Laboratory of open computer architectures.

The aim of the new organization is to develop European high-performance and energy-efficient computing solutions based on open architectures - such as RISC-V, OpenPOWER and MIPS - for their subsequent use in future exaflops class supercomputers.

The new organization will be based in Barcelona. Funds, organizations and companies that share the ideas and values ​​embodied in LOCA - the promotion and development of open architectures, as well as the creation on their basis of a full-fledged European HPC infrastructure are invited to cooperate.

Heads of the RISC-V and OpenPOWER foundations, as well as the University of Berkeley and the HPC and Cognitive Systems department of IBM Corporation, have already expressed willingness to participate in LOCA.

It should be noted that the initiative was not expressed from scratch: earlier, clusters based on the ARM architecture were already demonstrated in the Mont-Blanc project, and a European high-performance processor is being developed as part of the EPI project.

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