Measuring Success in Semiconductor Design Optimization, What Metrics Matter?
There are few fields in the world as competitive as semiconductor design exploration and verification. Teams might run tens of millions of compute jobs in a single day on their quest to bring new chips to market first, requiring vast quantities of compute and increasingly, cloud and emulator resources, as well as expensive EDA licenses, and the all-important resource, time. In this roundtable, experts will discuss the license-, job-, compute- and host-based metrics that the world’s leading semiconductor companies measure and tune for, highlighting the optimization strategies that edge out the competition and drive up profitability.
Conference Presentations
Data Discipline: Managing Engineering Data for AI-powered Design
The advancements in the fields of AI and ML, combined with the increased availability of robust simulation, testing, and field data sets has made engineering data science a critical component of the modern product development lifecycle, but in order to extract maximum value from these exciting tools, companies need a plan to store, manage, and utilize their data efficiently. They need data discipline
Technical Document
Using I/O Profiling to Migrate and Right-size EDA Workloads in Microsoft Azure
Semiconductor companies are taking advantage of Microsoft Azure HPC infrastructures for their complex electronic design automation (EDA) software. When one of the largest semiconductor companies asked for help using Azure to run its EDA workloads, Microsoft teamed up with Altair. This presentation will outline how Microsoft used Altair Breeze™ to diagnose I/O patterns, choose the workflow segments best suited for the cloud, and right-size the Azure infrastructure. The result was better performance and lower costs for our semiconductor customer.
This presentation by Michael Requa from Microsoft aired during the 2021 Altair HPC Summit, and is about 29 minutes long.
View all HPC Summit 2021 Presentations
HPC Summit 2021
Migrate and Right-size HPC Workloads on Microsoft Azure using Altair Breeze
A semiconductor company used Altair Breeze, an I/O profiling tool, to troubleshoot and tune its power integrity and sign-off workload before and after migrating it to Azure. Breeze revealed I/O patterns that had previously gone unnoticed and showed the migration team how to significantly improve application runtime and help the customer lower costs.
Use Cases
Using Altair Breeze for EDA Workload Migration to AWS
This whitepaper outlines the best practices for migrating Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads to AWS using the I/O profiling and dependency analysis tool suite Breeze from Altair. Profiling the EDA tool on premises and in the cloud ensures that the AWS configuration is right sized for the application and that costs are optimized.
Technical Document
How to Become an I/O Expert
Altair Breeze™ and Altair Mistral™ are I/O profiling tools that tell you how your applications are using storage. These unique products provide unrivalled insight into application dependencies and I/O patterns so system administrators and developers can troubleshoot and tune their applications. Dr. Rosemary Francis is the founder and CEO of the company that developed Breeze and Mistral, now part of Altair. She shares her experiences and describe how I/O profiling helps identify inefficiencies at the job level, optimise I/O to prep for and streamline cloud migration, and tune hybrid cloud. Altair I/O monitoring products help you understand the way applications access data to make every engineer an I/O expert. Reviewing this video on demand will help you to understand how Mistral and Breeze help design and execute complex physical design flows, reduce design risk, save money, and accelerate time-to-market by spotting critical dependencies.
Webinars
Altair Breeze Demo
With Breeze, you can quickly solve software deployment problems and resolve file and network dependencies. With detailed data for storage exports and summary reports for sharing, Breeze makes every engineer an I/O expert by identifying good and bad I/O for easy wins.
Product Overview Videos
Profiling I/O for Genome Pipelines: Sanger Institute Gets Fast, Agile, and Cloud-ready With Mistral and Breeze
According to Cancer Research UK, 1 in 2 people born after 1960 will get cancer at some point in their lives. Carrying out genome projects to find cures is a necessity, and the Wellcome Sanger Institute is on the front lines of genomic research.
The Institute's team needed to make one of their cancer pipelines portable and tune it for cloud deployment. They used Altair Mistral™ to profile the pipeline and look for inefficient I/O patterns and used Altair Breeze™ to profile the containerized workload in the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Customer Stories
EDA in the Cloud: Containerization, Migration, and System Telemetry
Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly good choice for EDA, but a data-led transformation is needed to take advantage of the flexibility that public compute resources can offer and to maximize performance and cost. Cloud allows an organization to benefit from a clear return on investment that supports innovation and rapid prototyping, provided those advantages are fully exploited. The wins achievable by a well-planned hybrid cloud strategy should see reduced costs both on-premises and in the cloud. The ability to dynamically tune compute and storage resources based on business and application needs is only available in the cloud, and only if the right telemetry and data pipelines are in place to inform infrastructure decisions.
In this paper we discuss how to put that plan in place and ensure that key business objectives are met as workflows are adapted and migrated to a new compute environment.
White Papers
Profiling OpenFOAM With Altair I/O Analytics Tools on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The software tool OpenFOAM is used extensively in high-performance computing (HPC) to create simulations but is known to have challenging I/O patterns. To uncover the reasons why, we profiled OpenFOAM with the Altair Breeze™ and Altair Mistral™ I/O profiling tools on the Oracle bare metal cloud. The results detailed in this white paper provide a clear picture about why OpenFOAM performs slowly at times and highlight key areas for improvement.
White Papers
Accelerating Cloud-based Genomics Pipelines Through I/O Profiling for Analysis of More Than 3,000 Whole Genome Pairs on AWS
This paper presents an overview of the work by the Wellcome Sanger Institute to make one of their cancer pipelines portable and to tune it for cloud deployment using the Altair Breeze™ and Altair Mistral™ I/O profiling tools. With the insight from the tools we were able to tune the cloud configuration to boost speed by 20% with a cost reduction of 10%.
White Papers
I/O Profiling to Improve DL_POLY for Molecular Dynamics Simulation
We worked with the team at the U.K.'s STFC Hartree Centre to assess and improve the performance of a number of commonly used HPC applications. They used Altair Breeze™ to profile and improve DL_POLY, a general-purpose classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation software developed at STFC's Daresbury Laboratory. This paper presents the initial findings and performance improvements that have been submitted to the DL_POLY development repository.
By looking at the I/O patterns using Breeze the Hartree Centre was able to reduce simulation software run time by at least 8% with a relatively small investment of time.
White Papers
Planning Cloud Strategy for HPC and High-throughput Applications
When adopting flexible compute, half the challenge is in selecting a storage solution that suits the application. Whether you are tuning for performance, throughput, or cost, or a combination of all three, it’s important to balance the compute nodes with the right access to data so that you are not paying for underutilized resources.
White Papers
Altair Breeze – HPC Application I/O Profiling & Dependency Analysis
Breeze makes every engineer an I/O expert. It is a tool for profiling HPC applications, collecting data on dependencies and I/O across the whole process tree. With Breeze, you can quickly solve software deployment problems and resolve file and network dependencies. With detailed data for storage exports and summary reports for sharing, Breeze identifies good and bad I/O for easy wins.
Technical Document
Six Smarter Scheduling Techniques for Optimizing EDA Productivity
Semiconductor firms rely on software tools for all phases of the chip design process, from system-level design to logic simulation and physical layout. Given the enormous investment in tools, design talent, and infrastructure, even minor improvements in server farm efficiency can significantly impact the bottom line. As a result, verification engineers and IT managers are constantly looking for new sources of competitive advantage.
Workload management plays a crucial role in helping design teams share limited resources, boost simulation throughput, and maximize productivity. In this paper, we discuss six valuable techniques to help improve design center productivity.
White Papers