Semiconductor company Openchip has continued its open RISC-V efforts, enlisting SUSE to collaborate on developing sovereign-centric architectures to power enterprise-grade open-source software.

The partnership will see Openchip’s RISC-V high-performance compute and accelerator devices certified for use across SUSE’s software stack, including its Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.

The partnership also encompasses SUSE’s hybrid IT platform, Rancher Prime. The collaboration will involve the development of Kubernetes plugins and operators specifically for the solution, intended to facilitate scaled container deployments on Openchip hardware.

The pair are also planning a machine learning and inference platform that would pair SUSE’s AI Factory stack with Openchip's RISC-V accelerators in a bid to create a “fully sovereign” solution that would ensure data and model residency and strict application safety.

“Our enterprise customers require predictable infrastructure that complies with evolving European data regulations,” said Andreas Prins, global head of sovereign solutions at SUSE. “By collaborating early with Openchip, we ensure that when their RISC-V hardware hits the market, the software stack - from the Linux operating system to Kubernetes container management - will be fully optimized, secure, and ready for deployment.”

Founded in 2021 after being spun out from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Catalan engineering firm GTD, Openchip is developing RISC-V-based multi-chiplet systems for Euro-centric deployments.

The Barcelona-based firm has secured significant European Union (EU) funding to fuel its efforts, including a $126 million (€111 million) injection from the bloc’s Next Generation Fund to develop a system on a chip (SoC) that uses multiple chiplets that feature open interconnections via the universal chiplet interconnect express (UCIe). It’s also working on developing reference designs for hardware platforms, as well as baseline software development kits and application services.

SUSE is the latest partner for Openchip, with the startup having already brought on board Japan’s NEC to co-develop new open RISC-V-based vector processing unit (VPU) cards.

Just last week, it signed a deal with Baya to license its data-movement platform and network-on-chip (NoC) technology to help its efforts in developing specialized intelligent compute systems.

Following its latest deal, Openchip CPO Robin Giller said: “Building advanced RISC-V compute accelerators is only half the equation; those chips need a reliable, enterprise-grade software ecosystem to fully realise deployment goals for data center, supercompute, public, and critical sector organizations.

“Partnering with SUSE allows us to provide a complete, regionally sourced, and competitive hardware and software solution that fits seamlessly into existing data center workflows.”