We can find people on the Internet with great knowledge and ingenuity who create some pretty crazy and interesting things. The creator of “bitluni” technological devices with a YouTube channel presented his latest creation. Concretely, he created a gigantic cluster based on RISC-V microcontrollers which represents nothing less than the equivalent of 256 heartswhich looks really spectacular and was not easy to create.
RISC-V is a type of open source kernel that uses a simplified instruction set. This allows anyone to create or configure a processor to suit their needs based on these designs.
Develops a 256-core RISC-V supercomputer
The “bitluni” video commented on the design, production, assembly and testing phase of the video. He emphasizes that it was more complicated than expected, emphasizing that everything did not go as planned. Despite everything, the end result is truly spectacular.
This enormous cluster is based on a set of 16 RISC-V processor clusters. Each cluster is based on a total of 16 chips RISC-V CH32V003 which communicate via an 8-bit bus. Additionally, each chip has an LED designed to be able to display lines of text or drawings, depending on the creator of this system.
Building a gigantic PCB to house all the processors was crazy and was going to consume a huge amount of power. Thus, for superclusters, pairs were created with a total of 8 “blade clusters”. In addition, each “blade” has two RISC-V CH32V203 chips which acts as a bridge between each supercluster and the main 8-bit bus of each megacluster.
We can see in the video how the microcontrollers are connected to the PCB, the GPIO connectors are soldered and everything in the megacluster is connected for testing. All of these then connect to a large main motherboard.
What is very interesting about the video is that it not only shows the beautiful piece, the end result, but also the problems. This shows how he discovered one of the design errors when he saw how the LEDs flashed. I detected that because there was no internal clock, the LEDs were flashing out of sync. Although they initially blinked synchronously, this synchronicity was quickly lost and they began blinking randomly.
One of the most informative points is when he explains how to programmatically handle bus collisions when all the chips are talking at the same time.
The final system uses 256 RISC-V microcontrollers operating at 48 MHz and a total of 17 RISC-V chips operating at 144 HZ for control. In addition, it integrates a system of 640 GPIO pins and a total of 256 ADC circuits. He also comments that the combined frequency, as if it were a single core, would be 14.7 GHz, which is not bad at all.
If you want to know the fun of that, well, ultimately it’s about learning and exploring solutions. It allows you to learn to develop complex systems and to understand the internal workings of a processor. In the end, it’s really like we were developing a processor, let me compare it, like we were doing it with LEGO pieces.
Note that the description includes all parts that have been used and are being sold. Obviously the motherboards are custom and we couldn’t find the designs in the description, so we’ll have to create them ourselves.