I have been thinking on how to design Solar-powered HPC platform for months. It could be very nice if it is based on RISC V…
Personally, I can draw the schematics of the whole design very fast and closely work with PCB designers. In 12 months, an HPC with hundreds of RISC5 cores powered by solar will be ready for community.
There’s three phases to my project and I’m currently completing phase two using ARM SOC’s, but I’ll be switching to RISC-V as soon as I can get my hands on suitable RISC-V hardware (or create my own, whichever comes first).
You can learn more about the project (and follow-along as well) on my blog here:
I have a Hackaday.io page for “Mark II” machine as well:
I don’t mention solar power in the documentation because I need to complete the ARM build to see where things fall power-consumption wise. I expect to have the Mark II machine complete within a month at which time I can do some measurements and see what it would take to power the system from the sun.