( SNUG 00 Item 22 ) -------------------------------------------- [ 4/05/00 ]
A PLACE IN THE SUN: One of the surprising parts of SNUG'00 was how the
majority of engineers stayed around for (and were actually interested in)
the Sun Compute Farm talk at the end of the conference. This talk was
a gimme to Sun because they helped underwrite SNUG'00. (I gotta give
some real credit, too, to the Sun guys because they didn't make that talk
an infomercial, but instead, they just told the honest experience of what
it was like to run a 500 machine compute farm for chip designers.)
"Day 2: Managing EDA Complexity (General Session)
Sun Microsystems discussed their regression environment and compute
farm. Starting in 1991, Sun developed an in-house regression
management tool similar to LSF called DREAM. They have about 500
compute servers, 2000 processors, and around 1.6 Gbytes/processor in
their compute farm. Also, they are in the process of upgrading the
connections of their servers to Gigabit Ethernet. Other than its
massive size, the regression environment described was remarkably
similar to our own."
- an anon engineer
"Sun Microsystems gave an interesting presentation on their server
ranch. Here are some of the interesting statistics. They have 530
systems, 312 of them are compute servers. This averages out to 3 CPU's
per engineer. Memory is about 850 Mb per CPU and total disk space is
75 Tbytes (terra-bytes). They run about 1 million batch jobs a week.
Every user has 100bT to the desk, connected to a fully switched network
using gigabit Ethernet between the switches and routers, with every
user seeing only one router hop delay. They have a custom environment
to keep it operating at about 95% capacity. It was a real impressive
presentation showing how to make a big server farm successful."
- an anon engineer
The SNUG survey stats came in with:
I design on a: 32-bit Sun ################################# 66%
64-bit Sun ############## 29%
32-bit HP ######## 16%
64-bit HP ### 7%
Windows or NT PC ####### 15%
Linux PC #### 9%
other platform # 3%
This adds up to 145 percent because most engineers design on more than one
computer. Sun seems to own most of this market, though, with the Sun OS
versions breaking out to:
Solaris 2.7 ################### 39%
Solaris 2.6 ####################### 47%
Solaris 2.5.X ########## 21%
SUN OS ## 4%
don't know #### 9%
And this year's new OS golden child is Linux on PCs. Designers in the
SNUG'00 survey reported:
I have low
interest in LINUX ###################### 44%
I have medium
interest in LINUX ################### 39%
I have high
interest in LINUX ######## 17%
Whether Linux is this year's fad OS request for chip designers or something
that'll stand the test of time, nobody can tell. Just a few years ago,
customers were badgering the EDA vendors to port to Windows and...
"This is the beginning of the deluge," said analyst Rita Glover, of
EDA Today. "There wasn't a full design flow until we got Synopsys
synthesis there. The others will come if they're not there now."
But the expected deluge is starting slowly, given that the latest
market figures from EDAC show that Unix-based software still accounts
for more than 90 percent of total EDA revenues. An e-mail survey
conducted last year by John Cooley, moderator of ESNUG, found that
many Synopsys users lost interest in Windows NT when they discovered
that software pricing would be the same as for Unix.
Analyst Gary Smith of Dataquest predicted that Windows NT would
account for 30 percent of EDA revenues by 2000."
- Richard Goering, EE Times, Feb. 23, 1998
"Today, it's maybe only half a percent on the Intel/WinNT platform. By
the year 2000, that will probably rise to 20 percent to 25 percent."
- Aart de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, EE Times, June 22, 1998
"Windows NT has not even met our conservative estimates."
- Aart de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, in his SNUG 1999 keynote address
"We all know NT for EDA is in the toilet."
- Aart de Geus, CEO of Synopsys, in his SNUG 2000 keynote address
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana, American philosopher, 1863 - 1952
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