DRAC project

DRAC (Designing RISC-V-based Accelerators for next generation Computers) is a new step in research led by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to manufacture open source chips from Europe. The project has the collaboration of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV).

The objective of DRAC is to manufacture a processor and several accelerators to be used in security tasks (encryption or protection from attacks against hardware, for example), personalized medicine (especially genomic analysis) and autonomous navigation (cars and other vehicles).

Both the processor and accelerators will be based on the RISC-V technology, which is the architecture with ISA open source chosen by the BSC for Lagarto and for the accelerator being developed in the EPI (European Processor Initiative) project.

The DRAC project, framed in the emerging technology groupings of the Research and Innovation Strategy for innovation in Catalonia (RIS3CAT), will receive funding of four million euros, 50% of which comes from ERDF funds and the other 50% of the participants in the project. The project, which has an expected duration of three years, will involve around 40 researchers, coordinated by Miquel Moretó, Ramón y Cajal researcher at the DAC-UPC and the BSC, and FIB professor.

The DRAC project is co-financed by the European Union Regional Development Fund within the framework of the ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia 2014-2020 with a grant of 50% of total cost eligible.

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