Description
HIGHER brings together 11 partners from industry and academia to jointly develop and validate open-source designs for high-densityrack-scale systems capable of supporting cloud and edge services at scale in standards-based data center environments. Starting withthe ARM RHEA2 and RISC-V EPAC processors from EPI and the RISC-V EUPilot processor chip, HIGHER adopts the Open ComputeProject (OCP) Server family of standards to build processor modules for computation and acceleration, alongside a system security/control module, all operating with fully-featured operating systems and runtimes. HIGHER aims to design OCP server mechanics toprovide modular rack systems incorporating reusable standards-based infrastructure, encompassing hardware, low-level firmware,and systems software, ensuring trustworthy functionality for managing, securing, and controlling servers. The project's open-sourcehardware and software outcomes will enhance European Digital Autonomy and facilitate wide adoption. Furthermore, the project willassemble representative software stacks supporting a range of use cases, including accelerated data processing and analysis forconverged Cloud and HPC platforms, Infrastructure-as-a-Service with standardized management and monitoring, Platform-as-a-Service facilitating large-scale data processing for ML inference and data analytics, and memory pool management at the server racklevel, with access control safeguards aligned with maturing CXL standards.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101189612.
