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

The Chapel programming language recently added
support for the RISC-V architecture. Here we discuss what
changes were needed for Chapel to work on RISC-V as well
as lessons learned from the porting process. We use some of
Chapel’s extensive benchmark suite to gain further insight into
the suitability of the RISC-V architecture for future HPC use.
We compare performance on SiFive P550 and Unmatched boards
and a Sophon SG2042 with a variety of other recent HPC CPU
platforms. Various portability and performance anomalies arose
on different architectures and will be discussed. While the RISC-
V machines represent smaller preliminary offerings and not
HPC-class hardware, these results still provide hope that RISC-V
hardware can become viable for HPC in the near future.