Two of the three IMT Atlantique teams entered won the top two prizes in the 4th RISC-V national competition, which this year focused on "accelerating AI applications on a RISC-V processor".
This prestigious competition, organised by Thales, the GDR SOC² and the CNFM, brought together 13 teams from France's leading universities and engineering schools (including ENSTA Paris, Université de Rennes-Inria, Polytech Montpellier, INSA Toulouse, ISAE-SUPAERO, Sorbonne Université-Polytech Sorbonne, Université de Lorraine, ENSEIRB-MATMECA, Université de Lyon 1, Télécom Physique Strasbourg, etc.).
The winners: passionate students
These students took part in the competition as part of their third-year engineering project (PROCOM). They were supervised by professors from the Algorithm-Architecture Interaction (2AI) team in the Mathematical and Electrical Engineering department at IMT Atlantique and the Lab-STICC laboratory: Stefan Weithoffer, Yehya Nasser, Ali Chamas Al Ghouwayel, and Amer Baghdadi.
First prize (€5,000) won by the LATAM-V team: Alvaro Scarramberg, Rogério Kaciava Bombardelli, Joaquin Opazo Yentzen.
Second prize (€3,000) won by the Breizh team, comprising Adrien Pellé, Le Nam Hieu Nguyen and Rémi Vassal.
Our students, who are passionate about electronics, computer architectures and embedded AI, have completed the Embedded and Heterogeneous Systems Major at IMT Atlantique. They proposed and implemented several key optimisations on the 32-bit CVA6 RISC-V OpenHW soft-core, including: the addition of dedicated SIMD MAC instructions to process multiple data in parallel, data buffering to reduce memory accesses, and efficient instruction scheduling to avoid pipeline deadlock.
These optimisations have resulted in speed-up factors of x8.4 and x6.7 for the MNIST digit recognition reference application generated from CEA List's N2D2 tool, all without modifying the source code of the CNN MNIST application!