( BSNUG 00 Item 16 ) ------------------------------------------ [ 10/13/00 ]
Subject: Linux Farms, Sun Workstations
SUN & SNUG: If you knew the history of Sun and SNUGs, you would have done
a double take at this year's Boston SNUG. Because Suns are the main EDA
platform of choice (March's San Jose SNUG 2000 stats below)
I design on a: 32-bit Sun ################################# 66%
64-bit Sun ############## 29%
32-bit HP ######## 16%
64-bit HP ### 7%
Windows or NT PC ####### 15%
Linux PC #### 9%
other platform # 3%
Sun has always been a financial supporter of SNUGs. Sun would give a well
attended talk on their EDA usage with compute farms which SNUG attendees
actually liked because it hit so close to home for the average EDA user.
"Why the double take, John?", you ask. Because this year Synopsys has done
a big push into Linux and the whole idea behind Linux is running UNIX on
PCs -- eliminating the need of having to buy *workstations* for EDA users!
"Linux farms: seemed to be a topic getting more attention of late.
Sun's presentation on Managing EDA Complexity & Tools Interoperability
touched on this as well as did Art de Geus (Synopsys CEO) in his
keynote speech. Apparently people are seeing 2x performance going to
Linux boxes vs UNIX platforms due to the 2x+ processor speeds in the
Intel based boxes. Most of the major HDL simulators now have Linux
flavors. This is major bang for the buck for designs which are
simulation intensive. Something we might look into, we could throw an
awful lot of simulations at a design with that kind of processing power
for that cheap. Don't know what the license issues are though on
Linux vs UNIX.
Synopsys recently changed it's license fee structure to a non-rated
subscription based system instead of up-front payments."
- Brian Fall of Microchip Technology, Inc.
"In the afternoon I attended a seminar by SUN on their compute ranch.
It was a similar presentation to last year's SNUG. But they had some
very interesting facts at this Boston SNUG talk, too. For 1000
engineers who use it, it takes 150 CAD engineers to support them. Sun
uses about 125 commercial tools and 250 internal tools. All their
code is in Verilog and they have ALOT of VCS licenses running
functional simulations. No backannotated VCS simulations are run, only
STA is used for timing analysis.
Simulations run about 25-45 cycles per sec and they run 150 Million
cycles 3x/week. 85% of their simulations are directed tests with 15%
randoms. They run about 1 million batch jobs a month. The full
regression run is about 35 CPU years long. (150 M cycles) Their
compute ranch averages 850MB per CPU. (4000 CPU's total) and is 95%
utilized.
Each Design Engineer at Sun has about 3 CPU's at his disposal for jobs.
Their simulation rate has progressed to running 1 Billion cycles per
month. Of course, Sun uses their own version of batching and revision
control SW, but for Software they have used Clearcase."
- Tim Wilson of Intel
"Linux:
Many of the people I've talked with say their companies are switching
over to Linux. The term "Linux Farm" or "Linux Ranch" was used to
describe a rack of Intel boxes running Linux. Synopsys as well as
other EDA vendors have ported their tools over to Linux. Reason: Low
cost processing platform, low cost hardware service (if it's broke,
just replace)."
- an anon engineer
"Sun's compute farm presentation
A presentation from a manager in their server design area. Most of
their focus is put on verification & running more & more large jobs
that are growing in size as well. They have about 3 CPUs for every
employee. They run at about 85-95% capacity. They are running Linux."
- Chris Kiegle of IBM
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