INESC-ID takes part in new Horizon Europe Project SYCLOPS
Eight leading European organizations join forces to bring together RISC-V and SYCL standards to demonstrate ground-breaking advances in scalability of extreme data analytics via fully-open AI acceleration.
The wide-spread adoption of AI has resulted in a market for novel hardware accelerators that can efficiently process AI workloads. Unfortunately, all popular AI accelerators today use proprietary hardware—software stacks, leading to a monopolization of the acceleration market by a few large industry players.
Eight leading European organizations — among them INESC-ID — have joined in an effort to break this monopoly via Horizon Europe project SYCLOPS (Scaling extreme analYtics with Cross-architecture acceleration based on Open Standards). The vision of SYCLOPS is to democratize AI acceleration using open standards, and enabling a healthy, competitive, innovation-driven ecosystem for Europe and beyond. This vision relies on the convergence of two important trends in the industry: (i) the standardization and adoption of RISC-V®, a free, open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), for AI and analytics acceleration, and (ii) the emergence and growth of SYCL™ as a cross-vendor, cross-architecture, data parallel programming model for all types of accelerators, including RISC-V.
The goal of project SYCLOPS is to bring together these standards for the first time in order to demonstrate ground-breaking advances in performance and scalability of extreme data analytics using a standards-based, fully-open, AI acceleration approach.
The project kicked off its activities in January 2023 with an online meeting, where all partners took the floor to present their ambitious plans to make the project a success. SYCLOPS brings together consortium partners with expertise in several fields (computer architecture, programming languages, systems and runtimes, Big Data, High- Performance Computing) with the aim of making groundbreaking advances over state-of-the-art in AI acceleration along three axes: (i) infrastructure tools for simple, fast, cost-efficient customization of RISC-V accelerators, (ii) platform tools (compiler, runtime, interpreter) for SYCL-based cross-architecture programming, (iii) application tools (parallel algorithms, profiling and porting tools) for cross-architecture AI and analytics acceleration.
The project will demonstrate its solutions in three use-cases, namely, Autonomous Systems, High-Energy Physics, and Precision Oncology. More broadly, the advances made by SYCLOPS will foster an open European and global ecosystem of AI acceleration solutions for scaling extreme analytics based on SYCL and RISC-V standards. SYCLOPS will reinforce European leadership in the rapidly growing AI acceleration market by bringing together key European SME partners who have played a crucial role in the formation of these standards. The experience gained in SYCLOPS will also be used to contribute back to the SYCL and RISC-V standards; bringing together the two standards enables co-design in both standards, which in turn, will enable a broader AI accelerator design space, and a richer ecosystem of solutions.
The SYCLOPS project partners are EURECOM, INESC ID, RUPRECHT-KARLS-UNIVERSITAET HEIDELBERG, CERN, HIRO-MICRODATACENTERS, ACCELOM, CODASIP, CODEPLAY.
For any further information, please contact us at: aleksandar.ilic[at]inesc-id.pt and leonel.sousa[at]inesc-id.pt (Local Coordinators at INESC-ID) and raja.appuswamy[at]eurecom.fr (Project Coordinator at EURECOM).
Upcoming Events
Educational Workshop on Responsible AI for Peace and Security (UNODA)
On June 6 and 7, The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are offering a selected group of technical students the opportunity to join a 2-day educational workshop on Responsible AI for peace and security.
The third workshop in the series will be held in Porto Salvo, Portugal, in collaboration with GAIPS, INESC-ID, and Instituto Superior Técnico. The workshop is open to students affiliated with universities in Europe, Central and South America, the Middle East and Africa, Oceania, and Asia.
Date & Time: June 6 a 7
Where: IST – Tagus Park, Porto Salvo
Registration deadline: April 8
Summary: “As with the impacts of Artificial intelligence (AI) on people’s day-to-day lives, the impacts for international peace and security include wide-ranging and significant opportunities and challenges. AI can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, but its dual-use nature means that peaceful applications can also be misused for harmful purposes such as political disinformation, cyberattacks, terrorism, or military operations. Meanwhile, those researching and developing AI in the civilian sector remain too often unaware of the risks that the misuse of civilian AI technology may pose to international peace and security and unsure about the role they can play in addressing them. Against this background, UNODA and SIPRI launched, in 2023, a three-year educational initiative on Promoting Responsible Innovation in AI for Peace and Security. The initiative, which is supported by the Council of the European Union, aims to support greater engagement of the civilian AI community in mitigating the unintended consequences of civilian AI research and innovation for peace and security. As part of that initiative, SIPRI and UNODA are organising a series of capacity building workshops for STEM students (at PhD and Master levels). These workshops aim to provide the opportunity for up-and-coming AI practitioners to work together and with experts to learn about a) how peaceful AI research and innovation may generate risks for international peace and security; b) how they could help prevent or mitigate those risks through responsible research and innovation; c) how they could support the promotion of responsible AI for peace and security.”