Elastic Metal RV1

System

SoC T-Head 1520

• CPU (C910) RV64GC 4 cores 1,85 GHz
• GPU (OpenCL 1.1/1.2/2.0, OpenGL ES 3.0/3.1/3.2, Vulkan 1.1/1.2, Android NN HAL)
• VPU (H.265/H.264/VP9 video encoding/decoding)
• NPU (4TOPS@INT8 1GHz, Tensorflow, ONNX, Caffe)

The kernel installed by default is not vulnerable to GhostWrite, we worked with CISPA security researchers to provide a fix before the disclosure. Installations made before the 6th of June 2024 are vulnerable, instruction to update your kernel are available here: EM-RV1 Guidelines: Update the kernel.

RISC-V is an open source instruction set architecture (ISA) developed at the University of California at Berkeley.

Unlike proprietary architectures, RISC-V is freely accessible, enabling anyone to design processors based on this architecture without having to pay royalties.

With its modular, extensible design, RISC-V offers exceptional flexibility, enabling the creation of tailor-made processors suited to a wide range of applications, making it an attractive choice for researchers and companies looking to innovate in the hardware field.

You can order your Elastic Metal RV1 server from:

• the web interface, directly on the order page. If you need help, see the dedicated documentation page;
• the command-line interface. If you need help, see the dedicated documentation page.
These servers are only available in the fr-par-2 zone.

The initial allocation of an Elastic Metal RV1 server to your account takes a few seconds, and the installation of an operating system takes a few minutes.

We support 3 Linux distributions:

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• Alpine Linux

Sure. Access to the server's serial console is available for installing the most exotic operating systems.

EM-RV1s feature the T-HEAD C910 processor, which supports RV64IMAFDC_Zicsr_Zifencei_Zfh_XTheadc instruction set modules.

Note that the processor also supports XuanTie proprietary extensions (XIE, XMAE).

A description of RISC-V instructions and their meanings can be found on Wikipedia.

We are committed to providing you with the best possible experience, but please note that the artisanal design and the youth of RISC-V processor architectures do not allow us to guarantee a specific level of service, resulting in an SLA of 0%.

Contractual guarantees for "Labs" services are detailed in our special conditions for BETA services.

Yes, a serial console accessible via SSH is activatable on your account.

The sources of modified binaries are available in /usr/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/source

An NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, is a specialized chip designed to perform information processing operations based on neural models or artificial neural networks. These chips are optimized for accelerating tasks related to machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision and other tasks associated with artificial intelligence.

Unlike traditional processors that execute sequential instructions, NPUs are specifically designed to simultaneously handle large amounts of data and perform massively parallel calculations, making them particularly effective for tasks related to deep learning and deep neural networks.

NPUs are widely used in applications such as speech recognition, image classification, machine translation, object detection, sequence prediction and many other fields where massive and complex data processing is required. They help speed up these tasks and improve the performance of artificial intelligence systems, both in terms of processing speed and energy efficiency.

If you have lost network access to your server due to a configuration error, you can try to:

• restart it. A guide is available here;
• restart it on a rescue image provided by Scaleway. A guide is available here.
• reinstall it with an image supplied by Scaleway. A guide is available here. Warning: this will erase your data on the local disk.

RISC-V is not yet officially supported in Kubernetes, but to let you test this technology with kube containers, we've prepared an image with the necessary pre-built binaries.

Thanks to Scaleway Kosmos and our Elastic Metal RV1, you can follow this guide to launch RISC-V containers on Kubernetes effortlessly and in just a few minutes.

All you need is a Kosmos cluster (currently only version 1.29.1), configured with a pool of external nodes and an Elastic Metal RV1 server.

If you don't have a Kosmos cluster, you can follow this guide to create your first Kosmos cluster.

If you don't have an Elastic Metal RV1, you can follow this guide.
Note that Elastic Metal RV1s are only available in the `FR-PAR-2` region in the `Labs` section.

• 1. Install the server with the `Kosmos` image.
• 2. Go to the Nodes tab of your Kosmos cluster and click Add external node.
• 3. Do not follow the instructions on the page to connect your server into the pool.
  Note only the `POOL_ID` and `POOL_REGION`.
• 4. Create a Scaleway secret key with the `KubernetesExternalNodeRegister` IAM permission set. How to create a secret key
• 5. Connect via SSH to your Elastic Metal RV1 server
• 6. Export noted env variables and secret key

  $ export POOL_ID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx POOL_REGION=xx-xxx SCW_SECRET_KEY=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

• 8. Run node agent

  $ sudo -E ./node-agent_linux_riscv64 -loglevel 0 -no-controller && sleep 10

• 9. Restart your server

Your server is now available in your Kubernetes cluster.