How HiPEAC Promotes Innovation Through Advanced Computing Research

As start-up stories go, the genesis of ZeroPoint Technologies — as told by founder Per Stenström — is more adorable than most. “I was reading tales to my young daughter, and while I was waiting for her to sleep, I started to think about cute ideas like: ‘Why aren’t we compressing data in the memory?’” Once his daughter was asleep, a literature search revealed the potential of this idea — “research had only scratched the surface” — and Stenström immediately got two Ph.D. students to work on it. Years later, the now thriving Chalmers University spinoff ZeroPoint Technologies was born. 

This anecdote reveals the enduring human element in technological innovation. Far from taking place in a vacuum, advances in computing are usually spurred by conference talks, papers, lectures, conversations, and myriad other forms of inspiration.  

The desire to bring people together around a technology focus is what led to the establishment of the HiPEAC (High Performance, Edge, and Cloud computing) community. The brainchild of renowned computer architect Mateo Valero, HiPEAC began life as a predominantly academic network, focusing on high-performance and embedded computer architecture and compilation. 

When Valero brought together a group of researchers to set up HiPEAC with European Commission funding, the aim was to establish a common research agenda and give the computing systems community in Europe an identity, as well as create opportunities to meet on home turf. Over the years, the HiPEAC network, coordinated by Koen De Bosschere since 2008, developed a reputation for excellence, creating mechanisms for networking, mobility, research recognition, and road mapping of future computing systems. As the network grew, so did the number of industry members, who found a talent pool formed of highly qualified researchers, as well as potential clients and updates on the latest advances in the field. 

Networks Nurture Companies 

Industry participants in HiPEAC come in different shapes and sizes. Like Stenström and his co-founder Angelos Arelakis, many academic researchers have spotted a void and drawn upon their research to give themselves a leading position in a niche deep-tech sector. 

However, moving the boundaries forward in computing is rarely simple. The leap over the so-called “valley of death” is particularly precipitous in Europe, unlike in the United States with its culture of academia-industry collaboration and well-established venture capital structures.

Partnerships Enable Innovation

For many European researchers with entrepreneurial aspirations, success varies wildly between regions and institutions, and the strength of the founding team’s network can be crucial at a company’s formative stages. Here, HiPEAC acts as a crucible, its events providing a relaxed environment where fledgling businesses can attract attention and target customers. 

“The style of HiPEAC conferences is a factor that shouldn’t be underplayed. It allows you to build strong relationships with senior executives that would be highly unlikely in most other events of this kind,” Yannis Papaefstathiou, the chief executive of EXAPSYS, a parallel computing and acceleration company, told HiPEAC.

Even before companies are formed, HiPEAC facilitates the creation of industry-academia partnerships by bringing together researchers from the two groups. This was the case for Francisco J. Cazorla, leader of the Computer Architecture – Operating Systems Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and researchers in his group. 

According to Francisco, HiPEAC played a fundamental role in helping the BSC researchers cultivate a relationship with different EU industries, which played a key role in achieving the EU-funded research projects PROARTIS and PROXIMA, focusing on bringing high-performance multicore systems into real-time, safety-critical applications. With a follow-up fast-track to innovation (FTI) project, MASTECS, Francisco’s team launched the spinoff Maspatechnologies — which was acquired by DANLAW Inc. in November 2022.

Expanding the Ecosystem With Open Source

As the Eclipse Foundation’s Philippe Krief and Gaël Blondelle have argued, open source is a key enabler of success for companies in Europe. Unlike their behemoth counterparts in the United States and Asia, European technology businesses must collaborate to survive and need mechanisms to do so. This is particularly true for highly technical, specialist fields, such as computer architecture and compilation, the backbone of the HiPEAC network. 

Take RISC-V, the open source instruction set architecture (ISA) which has been championed in Europe by stellar researchers such as HiPEAC member Luca Benini (ETH Zürich/University of Bologna). Only a few years ago, some questioned the viability of open hardware, arguing that it would never gain industry acceptance. Thanks in part to the research groundwork laid by academic partners, RISC-V now forms the basis of many European silicon offerings. 

While Benini’s group has collaborated with companies such as GreenWaves on ultra-low-power processors, in parallel the European research community has been making strides in expanding the RISC-V ecosystem for high-performance computing, much as they did for the proprietary ARM ISA through EU-funded projects such as Mont-Blanc. In fact, Mateo Valero has argued that RISC-V could allow European industry to leapfrog into new technology areas and overtake the incumbents thanks to the freedom offered by the open source ISA. 

As for compilation, many advances have been facilitated by open source. Indeed, far from jeopardizing companies in this field, open source has been pivotal to some of their business models. 

One example is Codeplay, a small company specializing in compilation, based in Edinburgh. Recently, the company was acquired by Intel to support the chip giant’s oneAPI ecosystem, showing that pursuing a strategy around open source makes excellent business sense in this niche technical field.  

Bringing the Right People to the Right Jobs

Even after making the leap from the lab to commercialization, deep-tech companies need talent to grow and major multinationals require staff to create new products. This is easier said than done: hiring for computing roles is tricky in general, while finding suitably qualified specialists to work on compilers, for example, is notoriously difficult.  

This gap spurred HiPEAC to establish the HiPEAC Jobs portal as a service to members. Allowing anyone to post European-based computing jobs, the portal showcases some of the most interesting openings in the field, while the pool of over 1,000 Ph.D. students affiliated to HiPEAC members means that there is a large audience with the necessary skills for the work. 

In parallel, HiPEAC promotes internship opportunities, allowing excellent candidates to be matched to an experience that will enrich their skillset and enhance their CVs. According to HiPEAC member Calliope-Louisa Sotiropoulou, HiPEAC represents “a great way to find highly qualified candidates with suitable skills in embedded systems and FPGA development.”  

The jobs portal is complemented by a suite of careers-focused activities, including: 

• The STEM Student Day at the annual HiPEAC conference 
• The HiPEAC Student Challenge
• “Inspiring Futures” sessions where companies can pitch career possibilities
• Career roundtables exploring first-person experiences at the annual ACACES summer school

HiPEAC has evolved considerably since its founding in 2004 and it will continue to do so in the future. What remains the same is the network’s mission to bring people together to carry out excellent research that, in turn, can form the basis of disruptive products and services. “Industry is the means of getting scientific results to the public,” comments HiPEAC Coordinator Koen De Bosschere. “HiPEAC will continue to facilitate this through the power of the network.”

The first-person stories in this article are drawn from HiPEAC interviews with members and talks given at HiPEAC events. Find out more in HiPEACinfo magazine and on HiPEAC TV.

The HiPEAC project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation funding programme under grant agreement number 101069836. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.