IBM Software Defined Infrastructure Electronic Design Automation Solution Brief

A Software Defined Infrastructure for Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

Boost productivity in electronic design environments

In the highly competitive , firms need every advantage they can get. Traditional IT infrastructures are often siloed Highlights and brittle, resulting in compute and data bottlenecks during large scale

• Reduce design cycle times for increased simulations. Faced with shorter product cycles, more complex designs, competitiveness and the high cost of EDA tools and talent, design companies need

• Minimize compute and I/O bottlenecks technology solutions that can help boost their IT productivity while during large scale simulations containing costs.

• Maximize use of costly electronic As a result, firms are shifting away from traditional IT architectures to design automation tools software defined infrastructure solutions with high performance • Share IT resources more efficiently, on computing (HPC) workload, resource, and data management features premises and in the cloud that can dramatically shorten design time.

Faster design simulation In the design process, simulation is crucial. Given the high cost of a new design, firms need to perform extensive verification across many facets of the design using software from Cadence®, ®, ® and others. Simulation can involve running literally millions of compute and I/O intensive jobs, including design rule-checking (DRC), layout versus schematic (LVS), voltage drop analysis and more. To get these simulation jobs done in a reasonable amount of time, firms commonly use high-performance clusters of computers. To eciently use these clusters, designers and IT managers rely on HPC workload management tools to enable policy-based resource sharing among multiple teams. Having more capacity for time and resource intensive tasks like

verification and regression testing helps firms do more design iterations,

reduce cycle times, and ultimately deliver a higher-quality design faster. These same firms are now moving beyond HPC technologies to software defined infrastructures which expands policy-based management to encompass storage and networking in addition to computing resources. IBM Software Defined Infrastructure Electronic Design Automation Solution Brief

EDA license usage A software defined infrastructure One of the key cost drivers in electronics design is EDA for simulation software tools. The tools used for device simulation are Software defined infrastructure solutions such as those from specialized, frequently costing more than the hardware they IBM (See Figure 1) enable organizations to deliver IT run on. As licenses are often in short supply, EDA manag- services in the most ecient way possible, optimizing ers need to ensure that they are allocated appropriately, and resource utilization to accelerate time to results and reduce that their usage is maximized. Basic workload and resource costs. These solutions enable the creation of a managers treat software licenses as consumable resources. If high-performance heterogeneous shared infrastructure an EDA tool is in high-demand, and all licenses are in use, a optimized for EDA design and simulation workloads. With workload manager should cause jobs to pend in a queue a software defined infrastructure, workloads are serviced awaiting a license. This type of simple First-In-First-Out automatically by the most appropriate resource. (FIFO) management of license resources can result in long Software licenses are managed for maximum eciency pending times for high priority jobs. To be more ecient, while respecting sharing policies between design teams EDA firms are adopting more advanced infrastructure and projects. management solutions that will allocate licenses based on configurable policies that reflect business priorities. With policy-based scheduling of EDA Scalable, globally accessible data software licenses, design firms can achieve As designs become larger, data and storage requirements significant cost reductions and are exploding with today’s design files being well into the productivity gains terabytes. With larger datasets, traditional file sharing solutions such as NFS filers are prone to network and I/O Beyond compute, a software defined infrastructure includes bottlenecks, slowing simulations. Often such delays tie up software defined storage – a resilient, high-performance, in-demand EDA licenses for longer periods than expected, virtualized environment that provides fast parallel , reducing productivity across the entire design environment. multi-temperature storage, and a global view of data across Also, a traditional filer can be a single point-of-failure. If a the organization. The software defined storage key filer goes down or runs out of space during a long environment provides transparent and seamless data backup running simulation, the entire environment may then and can replicate data quickly o premises or to the cloud become inoperable, setting back the schedule and leaving helping improve engineering collaboration and guarding engineering teams idle. against data loss in the event of a disaster.

2 IBM Software Defined Infrastructure Electronic Design Automation Solution Brief

License server B (WAN Licenses)

Project A Project B Project A Project C License server A License server C

VCS, HSIM, CALIBRE, Location A: Platform LSF Cluster INCISIVE, QUESTA Location B: Platform LSF Cluster

IBM Platform VCS, HSPICE, INCISIVE, Multicluster PSPICE, VCS, CALIBRE-XL, MODELSIM, QUESTA HSIM, INCISIVE, Virtualized compute MODELSIM

TCP/IP or Infiniband Network TCP/IP or Infiniband Network IBM Platform Data Manager

Workload-aware data management IBM Spectrum ScaleTM IBM High-performance Platform RTM IBM Spectrum parallel storage Scale AFM

Shared, global storage Storage Network with distributed cache Storage Network

Figure 1 - A Software Defined Infrastructure for Electronic Design Automation

Increasing your competitive A complete solution, on-premises advantage or in the cloud As designs become larger and need for simulation increases, An IBM Software Defined Infrastructure can help EDA firms compete not just on the quality of their designs, maximize engineering productivity, deliver more thorough but on the eciency of their infrastructure. Software simulations, and help contain infrastructure, software and defined infrastructures can help firms become more management costs. The solution, deployable on-premises productive quickly by pooling, connecting, and optimizing or in the cloud creates a shared compute and data IT resources. Resource sharing will boost engineering infrastructure that is both flexible and dynamic. productivity to simulate more complex designs faster while simplifying infrastructure administration and helping Heterogeneous IT resources are pooled, reduce costs. Ideally, the software defined infrastructure providing on-demand access to users and solutions should be available on-premise, in the cloud, or both. groups based on sophisticated sharing policies so that resources do not sit idle

3 Case in point: reduces Total Cycle Time with IBM

In the semiconductor industry, total cycle time (TCT), the elapsed time between an initial idea to a marketable product is a key metric. By getting to market first, firms enjoy increased revenue © Copyright IBM Corporation 2015 opportunity, and by reducing time spend in design and develop- IBM Corporation ment they reduce costs helping drive higher profit margins. IBM Systems Group Route 100 “We are seeing an order of magnitude performance Somers, NY 10589 improvement on the same hardware versus the previous Produced in the of America distributed file system. The faster the processing, the more we October 2015 can achieve with the same number of licenses.

Faster processes helps cut TCT and get products to market IBM, the IBM logo, .com, LSF, Platform, Platform Computing, Aspera, GPFS, Spectrum Scale, Power, SoftLayer and System Storage are faster and at lower cost.” trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many Alan Malek, Director of IT, Cypress Semiconductor jurisdictions worldwide. Synopsys and VCS are registered trademarks of Synopsys, Inc. Mentor Graphics and Calibre are registered trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. Cadence and Incisive are registered Solution trademarks of Inc. FlexNet and FLEXlm are An IBM Software Defined Infrastructure including: registered trademarks of Flexera Software. Reprise License Manager and RLM are trademarks of Reprise Software. Inc. Other product and service • IBM Spectrum Scale, a parallel file system for accelerated, names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of globally accessible file sharing IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml • IBM Platform LSF, a distributed workload manager optimized for EDA workloads This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be Benefits changed by IBM at any time.

• Reduced cycle times owing to faster simulation Performance data discussed herein is presented as derived under specific operating conditions. Actual results may vary. • Improved process reliability • Capacity to manage larger more complex designs THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT- ABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY Why IBM? WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT.

With its software-defined infrastructure portfolio for EDA, IBM IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided provides a breadth of capabilities that is unique, accelerating or optimizing nearly every aspect of device simulation and verification. Whether you are deploying on premises or in the cloud, IBM has you covered. IBM software-defined Please Recycle infrastructure solutions are designed to help companies increase their competitive advantage with an agile, high-performance nfrastructure that is optimized for technical EDA applications.

For more information To learn more about IBM software-defined infrastructure solutions for the semiconductor industry, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit http://ibm.com/software-defined-infrastructure To learn more about IBM software-defined storage, visit http://ibm.comibm.com/storage/spectrum

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