( ESNUG 461 Item 5 ) -------------------------------------------- [01/31/07]
Subject: ( ESNUG 459 #8 ) 3 users say Cooley right showcasing IC Manage
> I'm glad you finally see design data management as an important part of
> EDA! However, you clearly screwed up by showcasing a company, IC Manage,
> with little track record in this business.
>
> - Srinath Anantharaman
> ClioSoft Fremont, CA
From: Ajay Chandna <achandna=user domain=nvidia not balm>
Hi, John,
You picked a design management co. with a GREAT track record! We started
working with the open source Cadence Perforce integration at Nvidia back in
March 2002, and switched over to IC Manage's commercial tool suite over a
year ago; we have taped out well over 100 chips with them!
Our chips have an ASIC and a custom portion. The custom portions have I/O
pads, PLL's, DAC's and RAM's. Our designers work at the cell level in
Cadence libraries, and we use IC Manage to manage our custom schematic and
layout design libraries and chip databases.
What we like:
1. It's performance. We use a dedicated server to handle our IC Manage
Perforce data. A dedicated server means our end user cell checkout
and check-in times that are only a fraction of a second. We can
branch libraries with over 1,000 cells from development areas to
release areas in our vault/depot consistently in less than 20 seconds.
2. Multi-site capability: We have over a 100 users using the system
across multiple sites in the US and Asia.
3. Reliability. It has been an extremely reliable system. We have not
had any data integrity issues. Our only downtimes are network issues,
server/operating system issues or server software version upgrades.
Because our cell libs do not require scripts, we don't have to maintain a
script-library. Some of the things we can do at the command line:
1. Checking in groups of cells. We can check in groups of cells using
a single transaction. For example, in less than 5 seconds, I can
check in 100 cells atomically. With IC Manage's atomic transaction,
all the cells specified in the check-in list are guaranteed to be
transferred in a single transaction; in the event of errors or
network interruptions, the transaction is automatically rolled back.
This means that we don't risk getting 'partial commits', which would
hurt other groups trying to synchronize to the check-in. Also, with
this atomic check-in, we can bind a high level state such as DRC- or
LVS-clean in a single transaction.
2. Automatic access to prior versions. With IC Manage, we automatically
create a local copy of an old version of a cell and compare old and
new versions side-by side. We can roll back not just the cells, but
the entire library to any point in the past without having had to
explicitly create tags on the old versions -- creating tags takes extra
time and is an overhead for designers, so they frequently skip it.
With IC Manage's relational database, tags are implicit for all
versions checked-in. For example, when our designers find they have a
bug in a cell, they can easily find and verify any point, such as
3 weeks earlier, when the design was working, then determine exactly
what hierarchy change may have caused the problem, without ever having
tagged the specific version.
3. Remote operation. Our remote sites can cache files from the master
server to the remote cache and synchronize them to the user the same
revision of a file doesn't have to be sent over the same network more
than once. Without caching, our users wouldn't have the files locally
and would need to request a file over a WAN every time they needed it.
So with IC Manage, our remote users can simultaneously work off exactly
the same database as our designers at headquarters, which greatly
minimizes this server sync problems with having servers or mirrors in
multiple sites.
A mirror is a replicated copy of the database. The issue with mirrors
is that they can get disconnected from the main server, and unless they
are checked continuously, we can get synchronization errors to the
remote sites, which can cause design failures. Since IC Manage's
caches are entirely stateless, network or software errors won't cause
the remote user to incorrectly think they have the right files because
the mirror didn't know the connection was dropped. With stateless
caches, the cache always queries the master server to see if it is
the right file.
4. Derivative management. When creating new derivatives, IC Manage can
track the bi-directional relationships between 'parent and child'
and 'child and parent'. This is much better than straight copying or
RCS-style branching because the sources and the targets are recorded
in the database. Additionally we can propagate changes automatically
in either direction by using the meta-data records rather than having
to diff.
I spend only about 15 minutes a week on 'data admin' supporting IC Manage.
(On the client side, a user will occasionally mess up by ignoring an IC
Manage error message.) By contrast, with our old Cadence Skill based
integration I often found myself spending up to 2 or 3 hours per week on
end user data admin support fixing the state of users' local client areas.
Also, we have designers working around the clock on the same database. So
we can't afford downtime, including taking the server down, because to do
so we would have to shut down an entire design group. Since we are not
required to shutdown during backups with IC Manage, the only time we have
to shut down is for regular server maintenance. Thus we go 6-10 months at
a time without any downtime!
Overall, we are very happy with the IC Manage tool suite.
- Ajay Chandna
Nvidia Corp. Austin, TX
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: [ Gumby ]
Hi, John,
You made the right DAC pick with IC Manage for Design Management!
We are a biomedical company, and have multiple design centers doing high
reliability, low power IC design. We had several internal DM solutions
consisting of RCS, CVS and lots of scripts that did not work out for us,
so we evaluated the commercial systems from IC Manage, Synchronicity and
ClioSoft.
We looked at ClioSoft 2 years ago, but I no longer have hard data for
Synchronicity, since the evaluation was 4 years ago.
Our evaluation utilized a library with approximately 100 standard cells that
included Verilog, layout, schematics all other standard views for a Cadence
DFII library, which was about 200 MB of data. Our database server was an
E460 Sparc server with 2 GB RAM and dual CPU's.
1. Performance
IC Manage was multiple times faster than ClioSoft and Synchronicity in terms
of performance for creating and modifying configurations, and importing
design/library data.
Internal chip Library size Upload time
IC Manage Less 20 minutes 100 cells 15 min (worst case)
ClioSoft more than 3 hrs 100 cells 2 hours
IC Manage. I believe IC Manage is faster mainly due to the underlying
Perforce architecture, coupled with IC Manage's server extensions.
Cliosoft. ClioSoft's database had to be imported & converted to ClioSoft's
internal database format. Then all subsequent operations for data
modification/editing had to be re-converted to DFII internally as the tool
operated. There seemed to be major bugs in importing DFII data with the
release that I used.
Synchronicity. Statistics not kept on Synchronicity.
2. Reliability
IC Manage. After about a year and a half of using IC Manage, we have not
crashed, destroyed, or lost any data in the vault! We had 2 successful tape
outs of 2 IC's in the past year with correct data from configurations via
IC Manage. The IC Manage servers have never been down on either site due
to data integrity or IC Manage issues.
ClioSoft. No info on reliability of this DM system.
Synchronicity. The tool was buggy and they were unable to make most of the
minor changes that we required. We lost data quite often due to core dumps
and destroyed databases (DFII) that had to be re-synced or rebuilt!
3. Cadence Interface
IC Manage has a simple browser interface for the Cadence DFII integrated
into the GUI, which we use for all our data management functions. The
cellview pane has version and status information is available, including
checkout status and synchronization state. IC Manage's model contains the
lib, cell, view version, rather than just the traditional lib, cell, view
and provides full support for auto-checkin, auto-checkout, exclusive
checkouts and SKILL integration.
4. Underlying Technologies
IC Manage. They use Perforce, and incorporate an atomic level transaction
database system. Atomic transactions allow sets of files to be tracked
together, and change packages (sets of files related by a logical change)
are easily propagated. The revision in each object's history is only useful
in the context of its related files.
Perforce appears to support almost all operating systems and hardware -- we
currently run it on Solaris and Linux.
IC Manage also allows special branching- meaning that changes between
branches can be automatically propagated, without requiring diffs to
determine the difference between designs that shared a common fork point.
Perforce is able to compute report and apply the incremental updates between
data sets across complete hierarchies with ease.
ClioSoft. Judging from very little remote data setup and the operation of
the vault to workspace setup, the speed of the operation would have made it
next to impossible to use in our production environment. ClioSoft does not
allow special branching and the version I evaluated did not have atomic
level transactions. Without this level of operation we can almost guarantee
we will have missing changes and not be able to recover work reliability
from past iterations. Since we have remote networks, where the quality of
the link can be variable, the risk of partial submits is significant.when
these partial submits occur, they lead to an erroneous state that other
designers may synchronize to.
Synchronicity. Synchronicity did not deal with low level changes to
libraries, cells and individual cells properly. They also do not allow
special branching mechanisms
5. User Interface
IC Manage. Their user interface is fairly easy to operate and does not
require scripting. Our support and maintenance costs are reduced because we
do not have to support a library of scripts for performing data management
operations.
ClioSoft. Requires scripting for the customizations that we wanted to
setup, including creating and managing tags and workspace synchronization.
Synchronicity. As with ClioSoft, Synchronicity would have required several
fairly difficult scripts to customize for our needs. The speed of these
scripts alone would have been detrimental to the performance.
6. Admin & Set-up
We have very limited resources for CAD/CAE, so set up, ease of use and
administrative support are key factors for us.
IC Manage. The ease of use and setup enabled us to setup our environment in
two remote sites very easily and quickly-it took us less than a month to
setup a library and a project for real production design work. Several
engineers were able to easily setup workspaces on their Linux boxes at home
for after hours work with very efficient data management even with they may
have limited bandwidth data lines. The ongoing administration and support
is also low, and is pretty much limited to keeping up with the new release
and enhancements of the tool which we choose to do. We simply have no
budget for a full time administrator.
ClioSoft. We had a ClioSoft AE on site doing an evaluation that lasted a
couple of days. Following this it took using the tool for several more
weeks to finally get a library and project setup.
Synchronicity. During the evaluation, their local AE stayed on our site
trying to setup our environment for almost a full month. Even so, they
never got the system working fully. (I assume/hope the tool is easier to
use today). Based on the demo, the system would have required continual
day-to-day maintenance and support and we did not have the resources for
this. Training was required to come up to speed in using the tool. It
was easy to use from the browser based GUI especially setting up the
projects and configurations.
Conclusion:
I would recommend IC Manage provided that the system is setup with
recommended IC Manage servers or proxy servers. After using the low cost
Linux systems and the XFS file systems that come with the OS, their data
management is much more simplified and dedicated to that process. We can
use the system with Verilog/RTL development, standard C-code, documentation,
and firmware development. IC Manage has great price/performance/user.
- [ Gumby ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Steven Klass <steven.klass=user domain=smsc not balm>
Hi John,
The underlying problem with these data management tools is that as the data
sets grow and the number of versions grow, the system as a whole begins to
degrade. Quite frankly this is because most DM systems can't handle data
sets this large (several thousand files, several GB in size).
I've seen or heard of many CAD teams who went down the path of moving their
design teams over to Synchronicity or Cliosoft only to abandon it a couple
years later. I personally have seen and pushed design teams into these
tools only to become devastated when I saw the designers figuring out
innovative ways to work outside of these Data Management systems due to its
horrible performance.
In fact 2 years ago, at the Cadence User Group, a Synchronicity CAD user
gave a paper that detailed the problems with using Synchronicity and how
it breaks down over time. The sad fact is Cliosoft and Synchronicity are
great the first 1.5 years. After that they fall way short of expectations.
Their problem can be traced to the initial evaluation where the CAD teams
are given a limited amount of time and a limited data set to work with to
eval Synchronicity or Cliosoft with. Unfortunately a short eval which only
looks at functionality, integration needs and that it performs well meets
most CAD goals. Long term evaluations are frowned upon by both the data
management companies and company management. However this is exactly what
is needed to find a data management winner.
At my former company (1,400+ engineers) I was fortunate enough to be part
of a team of people who spent the due diligence and required time (1+ yr)
to understand this unscalability of data management tools. We evaluated
Cliosoft, Synchronicity and IC Manage. IC Manage won single handily. They
are currently deploying IC Manage to all engineering groups. I personally
tested IC Manage's scalability and can assure your readers that you are
correct, John, in only watching IC Manage. This company gets it - they have
a scalable product which can handle these growing data set sizes. At my
current company we are also bringing on IC Manage as a Data Management
solution because it's rock solid.
Reading Srinath's (of Cliosoft) email is interesting. The reason I am
replying is for his statement:
"We have built our own design data collaboration platform rather than
use a 3rd party SCM (software configration management) system such as
Perforce. Although Perforce is a very good SCM system, it is optimized
for general software development, not hardware design."
Perforce is the largest software configuration management (SCM) tool in the
market with over 200,000 developers at 4,000 organizations. I think using a
tool that has a proven track record is better (and smarter) than reinventing
the wheel for 50 organizations. I also think it's rather shortsighted to
think that SCM systems can be software or hardware optimized is funny. I
think 1 byte of software code looks the same as 1 byte of hardware code.
Having worked with IC Manage for the past several years, I can say there
isn't any finger pointing. In fact IC Manage believe in selling a complete
solution (including hardware) for the expressed purpose of preventing finger
pointing. The finger pointing I have seen from DM vendors almost always
goes back to the hardware limitations -- that's why it's slow, it's the
hardware silly... Or worse it's a limitation of NFS is why it's so slow.
IC Manage does not depend on NFS and the latencies which can occur by using
symlinks and sharing data (via smart cache). It's a totally different
mindset -- and quite frankly a cleaner simpler solution.
No, John, you're right for only looking at IC Manage. They get it. They
really get it.
- Steven Klass
SMSC Phoenix, AZ
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