Maisons-Laffitte (France), May 4, 2023
SiPearl, the company building the high-performance low-power microprocessor for exascale(1) supercomputers, is announcing the appointment of Vivian Blanchard as Vice President Hardware Research & Development. Previously acting as Head of Atos’ ASIC Research & Development department, he joined SiPearl to support the growth of the hardware research and development group to finalize the design of the first generation of microprocessor and to accelerate the launch of subsequent generations.
Vivian Blanchard (Master’s Degree CPE Lyon) has been appointed Vice President Hardware Research & Development of SiPearl, the company building the world’s first energy-efficient HPC-dedicated microprocessor designed to work with any third-party accelerator.
Vivian’s career to date has been in research and development working for Bull and Atos in the computing domain and especially HPC. He kickstarted as a physical design engineer, then held several positions in logical design, servers and ASIC architecture. In 2010, he took up responsibility of Atos’ ASIC Research & Development department. In this capacity, Vivian worked with Philippe Notton, CEO and founder of SiPearl, and Ying Chih-Yang, CTO, toward the launch of the European Processor Initiative consortium project which incubated SiPearl.
Appointed on February 13, 2023, Vivian will be capitalizing on the ongoing Series A to support the strong growth of the hardware research and development teams so as to finalize the design of the first generation microprocessor, Rhea, and to accelerate the launch of the following generations. Member of the Executive Management Committee, he report into Ying-Chih Yang, CTO.
Vivian, who leads all hardware research and development teams in the three countries of operation, France, Germany and Spain, will be collaborating closely with Vincent Casillas, Senior Vice President Software Research & Development.
(1) Exascale : One billion billion calculations per second
About... SiPearl
SiPearl is building the world’s first energy-efficient HPC-dedicated microprocessor designed to work with any third-party accelerator (GPU, artificial intelligence, quantum). This new generation of microprocessors will first target EuroHPC Joint Undertaking ecosystem, which is deploying world-class supercomputing infrastructures in Europe for solving major challenges in medical research, artificial intelligence, security, energy management and climate while reducing its environmental footprint.
SiPearl is working in close collaboration with its 27 partners from the European Processor Initiative (EPI) consortium - leading names from the scientific community, supercomputing centres and industry - which are its stakeholders, future clients and end-users.
SiPearl employs 130 people in France (Maisons-Laffitte, Grenoble, Massy, Sophia Antipolis), Germany (Duisburg) and Spain (Barcelona).
SiPearl media contact
Marie-Anne Garigue, Head of Communications : +33 6 09 05 87 80 –
marie-anne.garigue@sipearl.com
Grégory Bosson, Communication Officer: + 33 6 60 75 71 61 –
gregory.bosson@sipearl.com