Test-driving RISC-V Vector hardware for HPC

Whilst the RISC-V Vector extension (RVV) has been ratified, at the time of writing both hardware implementations and open source software support are still limited for vectorisation on RISC-V. This is important because vectorisation is crucial to obtaining good performance for High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads and, as of April 2023, the Allwinner D1 SoC, containing the XuanTie C906 processor, is the only mass-produced and commercially available hardware supporting RVV. This paper surveys the current state of RISC-V vectorisation as of 2023, reporting the landscape of both the hardware and software ecosystem. Driving our discussion from experiences in setting up the Allwinner D1 as part of the EPCC RISC-V testbed, we report the results of benchmarking the Allwinner D1 using the RAJA Performance Suite, which demonstrated reasonable vectorisation speedup using vendor-provided compiler, as well as favourable performance compared to the StarFive VisionFive V2 with SiFive's U74 processor.