Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Synopsys | Subject: Synopsys CATS MDP solution
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 12 September 2007
HPC solution cuts MDP turnaround
Synopsys has teamed with Voltaire to deliver MDP compute solutions that are highly scalable and reliable.
Voltaire and Synopsys are developing a high-performance compute (HPC) cluster solution for semiconductor mask data preparation (MDP) applications The HPC solution, which consists of the Synopsys CATS MDP solution running on a high-performance compute infrastructure with Voltaire InfiniBand and DataDirect Networks' storage, has reduced MDP turnaround time by up to four times compared to clusters using Gigabit Ethernet
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 19 Apr 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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Originally developed for Synopsys in-house testing and now available to customers, the new HPC solution delivers high-performance file I/O using the Lustre parallel file system from Cluster File Systems (CFS), DataDirect Networks' S2A (Silicon Storage Appliance) and the Voltaire Grid Director 10Gbit/s InfiniBand switches, which use Mellanox Technologies' InfiniBand silicon solutions.
Using the HPC solution, CATS has demonstrated up to a 4X improvement over Gigabit Ethernet-based solutions.
"We tested many different configurations to find the optimal performance for our CATS customers", said Fabio Angelillis, Vice President of Engineering, Silicon Engineering Group, Synopsys.
"If you use an NFS-based system with Gigabit Ethernet, for example, at a certain point you become I/O-bound and cannot extract further performance from the file system".
"In contrast, with a parallel file system, high-performance storage and a Voltaire InfiniBand fabric, the application benefits from the aggregate performance of multiple file servers and can scale without significant performance degradation".
"This HPC solution has direct applicability to our customers depending upon their needs, and we look forward to customising a solution for them".
"We are very pleased to innovate with Synopsys to target design cycle time reduction for their semiconductor manufacturer customers", said Patrick Guay, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Voltaire".
"The CATS application uses distributed processing that needs to stay on disk and not slow down the processor".
"Voltaire's InfiniBand-based switches offer high bandwidth and low latency to keep overhead away from the processor, allowing more CPUs to be used for the application".
"Synopsys wanted to improve the storage constraints to optimise the performance of its technology leading mask data prep application, CATS", said Josh Goldstein, Vice President of Product Marketing for DataDirect Networks.
"We believe that the DataDirect Networks S2A storage appliance can deliver the performance, scalability and streaming for low error rate mask data preparation with CATS to this solution".
"While process technologies continue to shrink, the CPU cycles required for EDA tools are expected to grow exponentially", said Peter Braam, founder, President and CEO, Cluster File Systems.
"By using the Lustre parallel file system instead of NFS, the solution offers high-performance, scalable storage with groundbreaking I/O throughput to enable new efficiencies for mask data preparation and CATS".
"We are excited to work with our partners to help bring this solution to market", said Thad Omura, Vice President of Product Marketing at Mellanox Technologies, the InfiniBand silicon and HCA supplier that worked with Voltaire and Synopsys to develop and tune the optimal InfiniBand configuration for the solution.
"InfiniBand's remote direct memory access (RDMA) feature that bypasses system processors during I/O and writes directly to disk is a key differentiator for this solution and brings new levels of performance to EDA tools".
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