( ESNUG 473 Item 9 ) -------------------------------------------- [05/29/08]
Subject: ( ESNUG 472 #5 ) Synchronicity questions the IC Manage claims
> IC Manage delivered better than I had expected. As we use IC Manage we
> find there is more and more we can do with it - it is flexible enough to
> give rev control of any file, not just a Cadence file, e.g. synthesis,
> digital libraries, text files, and coding.
>
> - Clint Meyer
> National Semiconductor Rochester, NY
From: David de Paula <david.depaula=user domain=3ds not calm>
Hi John,
I work out of France with Dassault Systemes in the Synchronicity business
unit that I joined 4 years ago. As a former Synopsys employee, I read your
blog with interest for years. We had actually met briefly at DAC San Diego
4 years ago. I always thought that what you are doing is good and to the
benefit of the EDA users but all honestly, I do not understand what your
problem with Synchronicity is?
Looking at your articles on Data Management tools, you would think that
IC Manage is THE solution but reality is very different.
Synchronicity is actively used by more than 150 semi companies worldwide
today including 13 out of the top 15 semi companies. You will not find any
IC Manage license at Intel, ST, TI, Freescale, NXP, Infineon, Arm, Nokia,
Ericsson, Samsung, Wipro, Conexant, LSI, Cypress, Agere, DSPG, Atmel...
because they all standardized on Synchronicity.
Your ethics, John, should make you wonder why? We have dozens of papers
and testimonials written by our customers you could publish that explains
how well we support them and the benefits they get our of our solutions.
I will be going to DAC, would you be available for a short meeting? In the
last 4 years, many things have changed, we have been acquired twice and we
are now part of a large SW vendor (1.8B revenues), Dassault Systemes. I
would like to give you an overview of who we are today and what we do for
semi companies as Data Management is not our sole focus.
- David De Paula
Dassault Systemes Sophia Antipolis, France
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
> Synchronicity keeps the stock Cadence library manager, while IC Manage
> has created their own, and it is a significant improvement over the
> stock Cadence one. Not only are we able to perform every function as
> before, it gives us a host of new and important information without
> having go to a properties window. With subtle visual cues we can
> easily see who has what cell open, what version we have on our
> local copy of the database.
From: Peter Haynes <peter.haynes=user domain=3ds not calm>
Hi, John,
I am the Product Manager for DesignSync. I have been working with this
product for a long time, having joined Synchronicity in 1998 as an AE,
and have been involved directly or indirectly with the deployment of it
to thousands of engineers.
We developed the DesignSync interface in a close relationship with Cadence.
We add functionality using their SKILL API, and are tightly integrated with
GDM. The Library Manager is one tool, providing a whole raft of DM
operations including some highly complex ones such as Copy and Rename. The
DFII process is another, providing the capabilities to automatically lock
an item in the DM vault (auto-checkout) and automatically put an item back
into the vault (auto-checkin/auto-cancel.)
There are many, many places in Cadence where views can be opened for write.
Using the GDM interface means that every single one of those is covered for
auto-checkout.
Our approach has been to integrate using the interfaces provided by Cadence,
maximizing our ability to stay in step when Cadence changes things. This is
why the introduction of CIC 6.1 had no effect on DesignSync's DM abilities.
We did not anticipate the increasing use of dynamic views which seem to be
causing other DM systems problems, but we didn't have to. That is because
we developed the DesignSync integration the way Cadence intended.
> With IC Manage, we can quickly and easily go back in time to an older
> version, check something in/out, make a local only copy, etc. - which
> is a very big thing. With Synchronicity, we couldn't go back in
> time without a lot of hassle.
This is wrong because one can select any version of a cell view in the
Synchronicity checkout form. We also include an "Open View Version"
function in our Library Manager overlay which allows you to open multiple
versions of the same view at the same time, which can be very valuable
when trying to understand the differences between two versions
of graphical data such as a layout or a schematic.
> IC Manage is very fast and we have no trouble with transferring large
> files across the network. Although we don't have any benchmark data,
> we've seen that IC Manage performs significantly faster both on large
> files and large numbers of small files compared to Synchronicity, with
> just the network transfer time making up the vast majority of transfer
> time for IC Manage. For remote sync on different sites a simple proxy
> server can be used with IC Manage to minimize WAN latency and get to
> LAN speeds for already cached data.
I have seen such statements in ESNUG in the past, and agree that there was
a time when IC Manage had an advantage.
But, we have not stood still.
We introduced an entirely new architecture 18 months ago called "modules".
Module based DM is not based on the management of individual files, but
rather on revision controlled directory structures stored in our server
as "manifests". Our manifest based approach utilizes change set
processing, which has dramatically increased performance.
While this anonymous user says he has no benchmark data, we do. Because
we do not have IC Manage's SW, our benchmarks were performed against
Perforce, on which IC Manage is based. Our benchmarks show that we meet
or beat Perforce, in some cases dramatically, in important DM operations
such as updating a large workspace with a small change. For this common
DM operation DesignSync is not a little faster, but 20 X faster, or more.
> With Synchronicity, read-only objects are network-linked back to the
> cache until you need to write to it. If you only want to view a large
> file then Synchronicity has a symbolic link back to the cache where
> only one version of the file is stored. This minimizes expensive
> network disk space, which is required to prevent data corruption
> because Synchronicity has client-side metadata.
>
> IC Manage deals with files, and their default is to put the full file
> in each workspace. They do this because they have no client side
> metadata, so they can store workspaces on inexpensive local disks
> (which virtually all machines now come shipped with e.g. 120 GB),
> boosting file delivery performance and chip design application
> performance such as simulation, verification, layout by an order of
> magnitude, particularly for large designs. IC Manage supports
> symbolic links as an option for objects you are only going to read.
>
> The downside of Synchronicity's symbolic link approach is that when
> you need to check-in or check-out the file the link needs to be
> removed and the real file put in its place, while with IC Manage's
> default approach the real file is already there so it's just a
> server command to checkout.
We consider this a large competitive advantage. Although disk is cheap
today, replicating physical copies of all the data in every user's
workspace is an incredibly inefficient use of disk, since any designer
is only actually modifying a very tiny subset of the data at any given
time. Using DesignSync, when a designer needs to edit a view the
checkout operation removes the link to the read only copy in the local
cache, copies the data from the local cache to the workspace, and
contacts the sever to lock the view in the vault. This is done very
efficiently. On checkin, the new data is uploaded to the server and
copied to the local cache, the lock is removed, and the physical copy in
the workspace is replaced with a new link to the copy in the cache. IC
Manage does not have to remove a link and copy data from a cache,
because a copy of the data is already in the workspace. But is that
really an advantage worth replicating perhaps terabytes of read-only
data in workspaces? Many customers have chosen DesignSync specifically
for our client side caching feature.
> IC Manage does not require shutdowns to do backups. Most of the
> little time we spend on IC Manage is on project configuration,
> and we don't have any uptime problems; it is consistently available.
DesignSync does not require shutdown to do backups.
Besides having made dramatic performance improvements to DesignSync over
the past several years, our new module architecture introduces exciting
new capabilities, such as the ability to distribute a single Cadence
library, or a set of libraries, over geographically dispersed servers.
So, if schematics are done in the US, and layout in the Far East, each
team can enjoy the performance optimization of a local server with which
they interact most. Our client-side metadata, which IC Manage does not
have, enables us to construct workspaces from subsets of data stored in
different servers. While the Cadence tools are oblivious to the method
of workspace construction - they just see consistent libs - DesignSync
"manages" the data in a whole new sense of the word.
I've been watching this discussion on ESNUG for the past few years and
just thought I'd chime in to set the record straight.
- Peter Haynes
Dassault Systemes Costa Mesa, CA
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