Non-profit organizations OpenHW Group and Mitacs announced the OpenHW research program Accelerate, funded by $ 22.5 million. The goal of the program is to stimulate research in the field of open hardware, including the development of new generations of open processors, architectures and related software for solving problems of machine learning and other energy-intensive computing systems. The initiative will be funded with support from the Government of Canada and corporate sponsors, with the involvement of academic and educational institutions.
The first project of the OpenHW Accelerate program will be CORE-V VEC, aimed at developing architectural optimizations for the implementation of RISC-V vector processors that can be used for high-performance processing of multidimensional data from sensors and to accelerate computations associated with machine learning. The project will be implemented with the financial support of CMC Microsystems with the involvement of researchers from Swiss Higher Technical School Zurich and École Polytechnique de Montreal . Three years have been allotted for the implementation of the CORE-V VEC project.