EXAPSYS (EXAscale Performance SYStems) is a start-up company established to bring to market several research results from Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) and Synelixis Solutions SA, focusing on HPC systems and applications, as well as edge/IoT low-power and high-efficiency systems. EXAPSYS’ goal is to develop innovative platforms for novel Edge/IoT, Cloud and HPC heterogeneous systems utilizing FPGAs and/or other hardware accelerators to meet real industrial needs. Towards this goal, EXAPSYS is also heavily involved in the development of tools to support the design of such systems.
EXAPSYS provides contractual design services for FPGA and ASIC systems, focusing on applications that involve hardware accelerators for HPC systems, RISC-V based SoCs and security components, such as cryptographic engines. As it is heavily involved in multiple research activities and collaborations with leading institutions and industrial entities, it also develops its own IP cores, which are made available either as open source packages or commercial products. To explore potential solutions and their impact in the final applications, EXAPSYS has also developed highly-accurate design exploration tools. These software packages (COSSIM and ACSIM) have been made available to external customers and are part of the EXAPSYS commercial products portfolio. The company has been awarded for these innovative tools (Digital Innovation Forum 2017) and has been recognized as an example of successful transfer of technology from the research domain to the industry (HiPEAC Tech Transfer Award 2020).
EXAPSYS is focused on bleeding edge research. Therefore it is heavily involved in major research and development projects at the national and European level. It participates in numerous initiatives that promote the development of crucial compute systems in Europe (such as the European Processor Initiative – EPI and the European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing – ETP4HPC). It is currently participating in multiple projects funded by Horizon Europe and other funding agencies aiming to produce hardware and software platforms for HPC and AI applications at the data center and edge operating environments.
One of these projects is MEDIATE. In this project, EXAPSYS assumes the Technical Management role and contributes its expertise in the development of RISC-V systems as well as components that aim to secure the operation of such systems at the cloud and the edge using technologies that aim at the trusted execution of applications and the secure communication and data exchange. Furthermore, EXAPSYS brings in the project its RISC-V development platform, comprising of server systems that provide the ability to emulate several interconnected RISC-V systems along with custom hardware accelerators implemented on FPGAs.