( DAC'18 Item 5 ) ------------------------------------------------- [04/30/19]
Subject: Users on IC Manage/CDNS/Cliosoft/MENT cloud gets #5 "Best of 2018"
TOLD YOU SO!: In my DAC'18 Cheesy Must See List, I put EDA in the cloud as
the #1 thing to see at that DAC. And, with 57 users commenting on cloud,
I'm proud to gloatfully say: "I told you so!"
IC MANAGE HAD MEAT: If you look at the word count in user comments below,
it's obvious when it came to actual substance in the cloud question, that
Dean's IC Manage took the EDA tool user mindshare prize -- especially with
his PeerCache tool to do either "hybrid cloud bursting" or accelerate your
tools in a pure cloud environment.
CDNS HAD THE TIRE KICKERS: Anirudh's marketing machine pushed his "Cadence
is in the Cloud" message all across DAC'18.
But many users had the impression that Cadence wasn't yet totally ready for
the Cloud just yet ...
"I might be wrong. But I don't think Cadence was 100% ready for
the cloud when they went to DAC."
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QUESTION ASKED:
Q: "What were the 3 or 4 most INTERESTING specific EDA tools
you've seen this year? WHY did they interest you?"
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IC MANAGE CLOUD
I saw a demo on IC Manage PeerCache for hybrid cloud bursting at DAC.
It's is a great concept for high performance.
It is a big move for IC Manage -- and part of the trend to move to
the cloud.
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We are a systems integrator focused on migrating companies to the cloud.
Over the last 18 months, we've worked on hybrid cloud environments
(cloud + on-premise) with a few hardware design and verification
customers.
Below is my input on PeerCache at all those customers, including some
results data.
Our cloud migration service falls into two main buckets, pure cloud and
hybrid cloud.
1. 'Pure Cloud' -- the company's design and verification
environment is 100% in the cloud.
Pure cloud can work well for small startups building specific
chips, such as AI and inference chips, that are laser focused
on creating specialized products fast; rather than investing
in building out their own hardware/software environment.
(One tradeoff is that it can be harder for the startups to
budget due to the variable op ex expense of the cloud during
their peak compute stages vs the more stable cap ex.)
2. 'Hybrid cloud' -- the company's design and verification
environment spans both on-premise and cloud.
Hybrid clouds are currently the norm for mid- to-large
companies. Their engineers are used to running tools
on-premise as they've done for decades and they aren't eager
to disrupt that.
Most importantly, these companies already have a major HW
and software/CAD investments in their on-premise environment
and want to add cloud compute for their engineers to be able
to burst their jobs/workflows to the cloud for its large
scalability. Plus, they can use newer cores that way.
Some raw I/O application performance data:
- without PeerCache 600 MB/sec.
- with PeerCache 2 GB/sec.
Without IC Manage, it may not even make sense to use 1000 cores vs 100
cores because the increased file access times offset the gains.
But PeerCache's biggest value is not this performance boost --- it's for
migrating from an on-premise environment to a Hybrid Cloud.
Using PeerCache decreases your cloud migration set up time, lets you
more easily bring just the right data you need into the cloud, and
reduces your ongoing cloud storage. Here are some details on PeerCache,
based on our experience.
1. It gets the right workload data to the cloud
Existing on-premise workflows include application binaries,
workflow scripts, tool dependencies, and specific libraries
that engineers must use. To do design or do verification in
the cloud, you must know what data to bring and keep all those
paths intact.
IT doesn't know this information. So, there would be lots of
costly and time-consuming trial and error trying to copy the
right data without PeerCache.
Doing this manually. I've seen it take a company 3 months.
The company thinks they need 8 TB, so they copy the data and
think they are done. But then they try to run the job and
it errors out because the right data wasn't moved. Plus, the
workflows change a lot, so you end up supporting two flows.
Using IC Manage PeerCache only takes a few days to get set up
and run your first job. This is because PeerCache transfers
only the data you actually need.
2. Faster cloud data transfers
With AWS, it's free to upload data to the cloud, but then
they charge you to transfer it back to your on-premise server.
But even though uploading is free, it takes time. PeerCache
goes a layer down, and only transfers the exact data needed.
For example: Data transferred to the cloud
without PeerCache 8,000 GB
with PeerCache 400 GB <-- 95% lower data volume
Because PeerCache cuts down the volume of data transferred,
your up/down data transfer time goes way down.
3. PeerCache saves us money on cloud storage
Persistent block storage, such as AWS EBS (Elastic Block
Storage), can get very expensive for storing your data in the
cloud.
The cost for storing all our data in EBS compounds over time.
This is how PeerCache saves us cloud storage costs. First,
it 'projects' our data virtually. Second, it uses peer-to-peer
caching for our application compute, and then saves our design
changes to our on-premise server.
Finally, we can delete all our cloud data after we complete
a job, so we only pay for the cost of an instance to store
the PeerCache "tracker" in the cloud. We can control when
cloud can transfer back to on-prem
Cloud Data Storage:
without PeerCache 15 TB
with PeerCache 2 instances*
(*if you store the PeerCache tracker)
4. IC Manage has 'zero provisioning' for applications in the cloud.
You must get your infrastructure code up into the cloud, and
you must get your applications to run. Configuring the
application and getting it running takes:
with PeerCache: 1 day
manually: weeks to months
5. Multicloud. IC Manage doesn't lock you into any one cloud vendor.
Although startups and mid-size companies typically use single
cloud environments -- at least initially, larger companies
want multicloud for more diversification, greater negotiating
power, and to take advantage of spot and reserve pricing models.
The bottom line is that if you are your moving you EDA workflow
to a hybrid cloud, e.g. for 'cloud bursting', PeerCache will
cut your time to get there and keep your engineering day-to-day
workflows running smoothly.
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IC Manage PeerCache
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The IC Manage PeerCache for cloud bursting stuff looks good.
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My company provides high performance computing (HPC) in the cloud for
multiple clouds. Our most used cloud vendors right now are Amazon
AWS (#1) and Microsoft Azure (#2).
We've seen teams with large on-premise workflows, who want to also be
able to run jobs in the cloud, i.e. a hybrid cloud. It would be
valuable for us to help them do this migration quickly.
We were interested in assessing IC Manage PeerCache, because IC Manage
claimed the tool enabled apps running in the cloud to access on-premise
files in a hybrid cloud model with caching capabilities to accelerate
performance.
So, one of our engineers installed PeerCache and ran some HPC simulation
jobs in the cloud to see how well it worked in accessing on-premise
files.
We found PeerCache had these advantages:
1. Accelerates migrating from on-prem to a hybrid cloud
environment. PeerCache did provide access to the on-premise
files needed to run a job in the cloud, and also transferred
the changes from the cloud back to the on-premise server.
2. PeerCache can speed up the cloud data transfer, because it
only brings the data needed to run a job in the cloud.
Companies may have lots of data on their on-prem servers, but
applications may only use a small fraction of it.
PeerCache only uploads to the cloud the data that is being
accessed by the application in the cloud, so a customer doesn't
need to try to figure it out and specify all the files needed,
and/or transfer too much data.
For a sense of this magnitude, some teams have petabytes of
data on premise, but a cloud simulation run may only need 100M.
Of course, if a company already knew the exact data needed for
each application and job run, then they could just copy those
files themselves. In some cases that is true, but for some
workloads running today on-premise, there may be "hidden
dependencies" that will be hard to figure out.
3. IC Manage gives companies the flexibility to work with multiple
cloud vendors for their workflows, while utilizing the same
on-premise functionality. This is important to us, as we
sometimes recommend that a particular customer run different
jobs with different cloud vendors to optimize their
performance.
For example:
a. Microsoft may have InfiniBand high speed interconnect, but
Amazon does not.
b. Amazon may have the latest GPU, but Microsoft does not.
Based on our experience, PeerCache works as advertised.
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We are interested in taking a closer look at IC Manage PeerCache for
cloud bursting. We haven't had time to do so yet.
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IC Manage Cloud Bursting
I have general feedback on the cloud for hardware design, rather than
on IC Manage's specific PeerCache product/approach.
The one area where I believe cloud might makes sense in the near term
would be for regression testing and verification of large designs where
you might be employing hardware acceleration.
However, for interactive design and verification work, we would need to
guarantee cloud reliability to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.
From a corporate standpoint, for employing a cloud network, we'd need a
guarantee of security, to be evaluated by our qualified IT specialists
and agreed upon by all stakeholders.
Cloud network would have to be proven to be reliable, as our development
infrastructure must be effective and efficient at all times.
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IC Manage PeerCache
PeerCache seemed to me like a way to speed up using cloud for
interactive tasks.
Our motivation is not there yet because the cost of our EDA tool
licenses is 10 to 20X more expensive than our compute resources.
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GDP XL
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IC Manage GDP XL
IC Manage seems to have maintained their strengths in data management
while moving forward with the user interface, now allowing customers to
use the latest methods and programming skills out there to accomplish
previously impossibly interactions and solutions.
IMO they've greatly raised the bar for the competition.
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IC Manage GDP XL
IC Manage GDP has an abstraction layer above configuration management
for hardware design.
We're trying to figure out if IC Manage could replace our current
commercial system, which is getting out of date.
IC Manage's Git API is potentially of interest. We do digital design
and some of our early adopters are starting to use Git, which is a
different paradigm from our existing configuration management/version
control tools.
Managing files for hardware design can be different from managing
software. We need to be sure that if our team moves to Git, that it
will still work with all hardware development and implementation flows.
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CLIOSOFT CLOUD
We use Virtuoso with Cliosoft SOS7 and Design Diff in the Cadence
cloud hosting environment. They do all the messy IT support for us.
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I laughed when Srinath said he had a cloud solution. We've been using
his SOS7 in the Cadence cloud for years. I think he forgot that we've
been using it.
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Cliosoft / Google Cloud integration.
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4. GCP with SOS7
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We went comparing Cliosoft, IC Manage, Cadence, and Mentor cloud.
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throw in Cliosoft for good measure
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Clio Cloud
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We're curious why Cliosoft didn't go Amazon AWS for cloud?
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CADENCE CLOUD
CDNS cloud RocketSim. My boss likes it for surge needs.
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Those discount 1K packs of Xcelium in AWS.
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Xcelium elastic compute in the cloud.
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cloud Xcelium
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I need 2,000 Xcelium licenses for 4 weeks.
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Rocketsim cloud seems interesting.
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We might do Xcelium / Incisive cloud.
Ut all depends on pricing.
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Don't believe they'll allow VCS on a CDNS cloud.
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Incisive cloud.
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Why was Palladium late in the cloud?
Frank is usually way ahead on stuff like this.
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Palladium / Incisive / RocketSim cloud
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We were curious about Cadence's cloud claims. Since we heard it was
actually done by IC Manage, we went to IC Manage instead.
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Biggest lie?
Running Cadence tools on the cloud will save users money.
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CDNS Cloud
We had more questions at DAC than they had answers.
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Pricing Innovus in AWS vs. owning in our own servers.
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Cadence Innovus in the Cloud
1.5 years ago, we had the chance to work with a start-up using Innovus
in the cloud. Cadence has a way for us to use it as a 3rd party without
own hardware and licenses. It worked. It wasn't as nice as our own
facilities, but then again, it was a while ago.
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Innovus cloud.
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Is Innovus PnR in the cloud secure?
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Spectre cloud.
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1,000 Spectre licenses for 2 weeks in the cloud.
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Bulk last minute Spectre cloud runs
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We asked Ravi at DAC if his BDA AFS will be on the Cadence cloud.
He just smiled and said nothing.
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Calibre in a CDNS cloud evironment? Not ****ing happening! Their
own Pegasus BU would never allow it.
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We're cautiously looking at Cadence cloud.
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I might be wrong. But I don't think Cadence was 100% ready for
the cloud when they went to DAC.
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We want to confirm Cadence cloud security with our own Russian
hackers before we go further with it.
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Anirudh's cloud push
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My mgmt doubts that Anirudh will let us remix tools on the fly if we
go to CDNS cloud.
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MENTOR VELOCE2 CLOUD
Our purchasing guys are talking with MENT for Veloce Cloud pricing.
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cloud veloce
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We like their whole concept of automatically selecting the Veloce
CPUs that our job needs.
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Veloce2 on the cloud? Yes. Older Veloce boxes on the cloud? No.
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Sawicki was funny on the Troublermaker panel about if he'd have seen
the Cadence cloud press release before DAC, he would have had Mentor
do a simular all-MENT-tools-on-the-Cloud announcement, too.
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ARM uses Veloce2 Cloud was big news for my management.
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METRICS CLOUD
We tried to look at Costello's Montana and fell into a Metrics cloud
talk instead. Making a Verilog simular that's cloud-friendly from
it's inception sounds interesting. We'd want to see the benchmark
numbers of it against VCS or Incisive before thinking of buying it.
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Metrics pay-per-minute Verilog
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Metrics cloud verilog
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Related Articles
Anirudh and Sawicki on why CDNS and MENT did the Cloud this year
SCOOP -- Mentor Veloce to announce first HW emulator on the Cloud
a first look at pay-per-minute Metrics System Verilog simulator
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