What question did this study set out to answer?

The aim is to assess the readiness and performance of ARM and RISC-V CPUs in production environments.

February 5, 2026

Heterogeneous computing at INFN-T1

ACAndrea ChiericiIstituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Centro Nazionale Analisi Fotogrammi DMDiego MichelottoIstituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Centro Nazionale Analisi Fotogrammi GSGiusy SergiIstituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

Key Points

The aim is to assess the readiness and performance of ARM and RISC-V CPUs in production environments.
Acquisition of ARM and RISC-V CPU nodes at INFN-T1.
Initial testing of both CPU architectures for stability and software readiness.
Integration of ARM resources into the standard production farm.
Comparison of performance metrics between ARM, RISC-V, and x86_64 CPUs.
ARM nodes demonstrated production-quality stability and were integrated into the standard farm.
RISC-V nodes were found to be not ready for general production use and remain in a testbed phase.
Performance of ARM and RISC-V CPUs is evaluated against x86_64 counterparts.

Abstract

At INFN-T1 we recently acquired some nodes with ARM and RISC-V CPUs to understand the experiment level of readiness on new hardware solutions and to test our production pipelines. After some initial testing, ARM resources entered the standard farm, since the stability both of the nodes and of the software was production quality ready. On the contrary RISC-V solutions are still to be considered only as testbed, since the software is not ready for general production. In this article we will describe all the activities that were necessary to enable users to run on ARM and RISC-V and will give some figures on performance, compared to x86₆4 counterpart. In the end we will try to describe our point of view for the possible mass adoption of this architecture in Tier1 data centers.

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