Burst EDA Workflows to the Public Cloud:Accelerate Design, Simulation, and Verification with Elastic, Cloud-Based Resources

SOLUTIONS BRIEF

In the hyper-competitive semiconductor design industry, time-to-market is crucial to success. Unfortunately, IT limitations often bottleneck the efficient execution of bursty, data-intensive Engineering Design Automation (EDA) workflows. Semiconductor manufacturers and independent design houses (IDHs) are now overcoming this challenge by leveraging the limitless performance and IT elasticity available in the public cloud.

The semiconductor design process, whether producing general-purpose ICs or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), relies on effective data processing and management. Throughout the design cycle, various EDA tools create and analyze massive amounts of data using files of varying sizes and types. These ever-expanding, data-intensive workloads often stress the underlying infrastructure, with IT resources frequently becoming the key roadblock to achieving the desired time-to-market. Today, integration with the public cloud offers the promise of truly scalable, elastic semiconductor IT.

However, to leverage the benefits of cloud and satisfy the demanding requirements of semiconductor design flows, IT architects need modern, cloud-based data management solutions.

Elastifile makes cloud-integrated EDA a reality by resolving key cloud integration challenges, such as:

Supporting existing EDA tools and scripts in the cloud Sophisticated EDA tools are the foundation of modern semiconductor design. IC designers rely on these tools daily to perform critical design, simulation, and verification tasks for multi-million dollar semiconductor design projects. To function properly, most EDA tools need a scalable, enterprise-grade NFS file system which enforces strict data consistency. Until recently, however, the public cloud lacked appropriate file storage options.

Delivering high-performance, cloud-based data services To validate complex semiconductor designs, designers rely on high-powered, parallel simulation and verification tools. These crucial tools often spawn data-intensive, concurrent analysis jobs that need to create and ingest files very rapidly. To avoid data access bottlenecks, cloud-based file storage must deliver consistently high, parallel performance with linear scalability.

Aligning infrastructure costs to business demand The bursty nature of semiconductor design is problematic for traditional, on-premises IT. Sizing infrastructure for peak loads means costly resources will frequently go underutilized…while sizing for average load creates bottlenecks during critical, resources-intensive peaks (e.g. during simulation just before IC tape out). To make financial sense, cloud-based EDA infrastructure must provide elasticity to match the bursty nature of semiconductor design flows.

Other Toolsand Scripts

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Elastically ScalableCloud-Based Resources

Scalable, High-Performance Infrastructure for Cloud-Integrated EDA

Elastifile delivers high-performance, POSIX-compliant file services for both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure. Cloud deployment enables semiconductor design flows to efficiently leverage scalable cloud-based compute, memory, and storage…with no modifications to existing EDA tools or scripts.

Support existing EDA tools and scripts in the cloud

Deliver high-performance, cloud-based data services

Align infrastructure costs to business demand

Elastifile was designed to handle the high-performance, data-intensive workloads generated by modern EDA tools during time-sensitive design processes. Its distributed metadata model supports highly parallel access and keeps pace with the rapid creation, ingestion, and modification of files caused by tools performing critical tasks such as circuit simulation and parasitic extraction.

Elastifile’s cloud-based data infrastructure provides granular, consumption-based pricing and deploys on-demand at the push of a button. When workload requirements scale, Elastifile performance and capacity can be dynamically scaled to align. Then, when jobs complete, Elastifile infrastructure can be spun down (with results tiered to object storage for long-term retention, if desired), thereby incurring no further costs. This elasticity allows semiconductor design firms to handle bursty workloads, while keeping infrastructure costs aligned with true demand and eliminating over-spending.

About ELASTIFILEElastifile is redefining the way data is stored and managed in the cloud, on-premises, and spanning hybrid clouds. Powered by an elastically scalable, enterprise-grade, distributed file system with integrated object tiering, Elastifile’s cross-cloud data fabric delivers high performance, unified access to global data. By freeing data from traditional storage silos, Elastifile enables frictionless movement of applications to the cloud, between clouds, and across hybrid environments. This allows enterprises to seamlessly leverage cloud infrastructure and services to enhance and accelerate a broad range of data-driven workflows, including: analytics, DevOps, high-performance computing, and many more.

Elastifile was founded in 2013 and is backed by seven market leaders from across the data center and storage industries, Battery Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

2880 Lakeside Dr., Suite 228Santa Clara, CA 95054info@elastifile.com | www.elastifile.com

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