China’s Shandong University has deployed a server cluster featuring RISC-V CPUs.

The system has a total of 3,072 cores, with 48 nodes of 64-bit RISC-V CPUs. David Chen, director of ecosystem at Alibaba, said that it is the first commercial implementation of a RISC-V cluster in the cloud at the RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, first reported by HPCwire.

Shandong University's RISC-V system uses the Sophgo SG2042 chip, with a clock speed of 2GHz and 64MB of cache, supporting the PCIe Gen 4 interface. The processor was launched earlier this year, with Alibaba partnering to bring Linux OS to the chip.

At the RISC-V Summit, Chen called on developers around the world to support 20,000 cloud computing packages to RISC-V and help support the wider RISC-V ecosystem.

RISC-V is an open standard instruction set (ISA) architecture based on established RISC principles, which is provided under open source licenses that do not require fees.

The ISA still has a long way to go to compete with Arm or x86 architectures but has seen increasing support in China due to the open source nature making sanctions harder to enact.