Comments on: What To Do With 1000 CPUs - The Answers http://theasicguy.com/2009/04/15/what-to-do-with-1000-cpus-the-answers/ sharing insights into the people side of ASIC design Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:43:13 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.2 By: Jeremy Ralph http://theasicguy.com/2009/04/15/what-to-do-with-1000-cpus-the-answers/#comment-704 Jeremy Ralph Tue, 05 May 2009 07:37:45 +0000 http://theasicguy.com/2009/04/15/what-to-do-with-1000-cpus-the-answers/#comment-704 Commented on Bridging the Gulf's blog (from link above)... I think it would be possible to speed up simulations using many processors and a high-speed interconnect and some gate arrays. Isn't that what an emulator does? Maybe there is a market for a "verification cloud" with the resources and costs shared between many different companies. Commented on Bridging the Gulf’s blog (from link above)…

I think it would be possible to speed up simulations using many processors and a high-speed interconnect and some gate arrays. Isn’t that what an emulator does? Maybe there is a market for a “verification cloud” with the resources and costs shared between many different companies.

]]> By: Bridging the Gulf: the Embarrassing Truth « Bugs Are Easy http://theasicguy.com/2009/04/15/what-to-do-with-1000-cpus-the-answers/#comment-592 Bridging the Gulf: the Embarrassing Truth « Bugs Are Easy Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:31:51 +0000 http://theasicguy.com/2009/04/15/what-to-do-with-1000-cpus-the-answers/#comment-592 [...] this was a timely post. Just a few days after my last post, Harry  (theAsicGuy) Gries posted an entry speculating that having thousands of computers available would revolutionize EDA algorithms. I [...] […] this was a timely post. Just a few days after my last post, Harry  (theAsicGuy) Gries posted an entry speculating that having thousands of computers available would revolutionize EDA algorithms. I […]

]]> By: Jeremy Ralph http://theasicguy.com/2009/04/15/what-to-do-with-1000-cpus-the-answers/#comment-584 Jeremy Ralph Thu, 16 Apr 2009 00:06:57 +0000 http://theasicguy.com/2009/04/15/what-to-do-with-1000-cpus-the-answers/#comment-584 Thanks for the props Harry. For the "rent them out model", one would have to figure out how to federate the users, data and runtime, to ensure privacy. Since not many EDA GUIs are AJAX, they can't run quickly and cleanly in a web browser. That being said, EDA GUIs for synthesis tools are rarely used, and simulator GUIs are only really useful for debugging and non-regression. For non-GUI batch jobs, some AJAX interface would be nice to dispatch jobs and script flows. For client/server web security/scalability a load balancer with encryption acceleration would be nice. And to eliminate downtime there would need to be some redundancy at the web end. The majority of other nodes, after allocating some nodes for the above, could be worker compute nodes for batch type jobs that get dispatched to a job queue, via a slick AJAX web service interface that also uses email for sending messages. These worker nodes would run the tools and would resemble a central CAD compute grid. For all the above, the intent is to run applications over the web that were not intended to be run that way, and this makes for over complicated infrastructure and complexity. James from Xuropa with the online labs and the people at Cadence, with their hosted design solution have figured how to run traditional apps over the web. Our approach at PDTi with http://spectareg.com has been to build it as a web-application from the start so it's a bit different. Thanks for the props Harry. For the “rent them out model”, one would have to figure out how to federate the users, data and runtime, to ensure privacy.

Since not many EDA GUIs are AJAX, they can’t run quickly and cleanly in a web browser. That being said, EDA GUIs for synthesis tools are rarely used, and simulator GUIs are only really useful for debugging and non-regression.

For non-GUI batch jobs, some AJAX interface would be nice to dispatch jobs and script flows.

For client/server web security/scalability a load balancer with encryption acceleration would be nice. And to eliminate downtime there would need to be some redundancy at the web end.

The majority of other nodes, after allocating some nodes for the above, could be worker compute nodes for batch type jobs that get dispatched to a job queue, via a slick AJAX web service interface that also uses email for sending messages. These worker nodes would run the tools and would resemble a central CAD compute grid.

For all the above, the intent is to run applications over the web that were not intended to be run that way, and this makes for over complicated infrastructure and complexity. James from Xuropa with the online labs and the people at Cadence, with their hosted design solution have figured how to run traditional apps over the web. Our approach at PDTi with http://spectareg.com has been to build it as a web-application from the start so it’s a bit different.

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