Porting and Benchmarking Chapel on Emerging RISC-V Hardware: An HPC Viability Study

The Chapel programming language recently addedsupport for the RISC-V architecture. Here we discuss whatchanges were needed for Chapel to work on RISC-V as wellas lessons learned from the porting process. We use some ofChapel’s extensive benchmark suite to gain further insight intothe suitability of the RISC-V architecture for future HPC use.We compare performance on SiFive P550 and Unmatched boardsand a Sophon SG2042 with a variety of other recent HPC CPUplatforms. Various portability and performance anomalies aroseon different architectures and will be discussed. While the RISC-V machines represent smaller preliminary offerings and notHPC-class hardware, these results still provide hope that RISC-Vhardware can become viable for HPC in the near future.