Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Synopsys
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 23 November 2006
In-house supercomputer is one of the
best
Synopsys has become the first electronic design automation company to be included on a list of sites operating the world's most powerful supercomputers.
Synopsys has become the first electronic design automation (EDA) company to be included on a list of sites operating the world's most powerful supercomputers The Synopsys-built supercomputer was ranked as the 242nd most powerful supercomputer in the world by Top500, an independent organisation of international supercomputing experts that tracks the world's most powerful computers
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Apr 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The Synopsys supercomputer was built to quickly perform production runs with intense compute needs.
Synopsys constructed the supercomputer in less than four months using commodity Linux servers, delivering up to ten times the software performance of traditional legacy computing systems in certain applications.
Synopsys' supercomputer achieved benchmark results surpassing 3.7 Teraflops - or 3.7 trillion floating-point operations per second - roughly equivalent to 18,000 personal computers all working together at the same time to solve the same problem.
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"Synopsys IT is focused on optimising our existing computing infrastructure to enable our engineers to perform their jobs more effectively", said Debra Martucci, CIO and Vice President of IT for Synopsys.
"This supercomputing milestone illustrates how we are able to do more with the IT equipment we already have".
"By reconfiguring our existing commodity hardware, we're exceeding our performance benchmarks and achieving greater than 50% global utilisation rates for our server infrastructure".
Rather than purchase expensive equipment that would remain idle much of the year, the Synopsys IT team re-architected and redeployed existing off-the-shelf hardware on a nightly basis to operate, baseline and tune the supercomputer.
This strategy maximised total cost of ownership while minimising any impact to daily business operations.
During more than one thousand scheduled system tests, the IT team constructed the testing requirements and measured and tuned the various configuration options.
This allowed them to maximise operational performance with minimal additions to the network and compute infrastructure.
The Synopsys supercomputer, completed in September 2006, comprises 329 Linux servers connected by nonblocking standard Gigabit Ethernet.
It was assembled from six pre-existing clusters of Linux servers used by Synopsys engineers during business hours.
In recent years the cost of supercomputing has plummeted, largely due to the rise of Linux and dramatic improvements in the performance of commodity computing servers, analysts say.
Thanks to these price-to-performance gains, sales of high-performance computers grew at 24% to $9.2 billion in 2005, according to market research firm IDC.
Twice a year, the Top500 organisation ranks the most powerful computers in the world at commercial, scientific and academic research institutions.
The Top500 list is determined by technology experts from the University of Mannheim, Germany, the University of Tennessee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California who review supercomputer speeds as well as the data they process.
The organisation was founded in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high performance computing.
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