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Editor’s note: As we see computing and data needs grow exponentially, we’re pleased to hear today from ClioSoft, which offers system-on-chip (SoC) design data and IP management solutions. Their platform is used widely in the semiconductor industry. Running ClioSoft’s SOS7 design management platform on Google Cloud Filestore is simple and can provide great performance.
Along with hearing ClioSoft’s story, we’re also excited that Cloud Filestore is now generally available. Read on for details on how ClioSoft tested Cloud Filestore against typical on-premises performance for its customer needs. Learn more here about Cloud Filestore.
Integrated circuits (ICs) powering today’s automotive, mobile and IoT applications are enormously powerful and complex. To develop an IC, design teams often undergo an extended engineering and testing process. They’re often faced with tight schedules to bring products to market and compete with consumer demands, and are borrowing the best practices of software design to speed development.
However, IC design environments are notably different than software design environments because they rely heavily on shared files. A typical design engineer’s work area consists of large number of binary files, which tend to be rather large, often numbering in GB size. These files are often generated by electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Some of these files are generated only a few times during the life of the project, but used by almost all members of the project very often. In addition, there are usually third-party libraries and process design kits (PDKs) that the entire team relies on for practically each simulation or verification run. This setup requires a lot of high-performance storage to be accessible on several compute machines, and the productivity of teams designing integrated circuits can easily be impacted without enough high-performance storage.
We know from what our customers tell us that optimization of storage resources is one of the top criterion in the design environment, since the design data size is so large. Our SOS7 design management platform creates shared smart cache areas where all design files not being modified are hosted. User access to these design files is provided by tool-managed Linux symbolic links in the user’s working directory. This is one key feature used by most of our customers to create links to the cache workspace, since it can help reduce up to 90% of the design team’s storage requirements.
We’re always eager to optimize the user’s design environment, so we used Google’s Cloud Filestore, recently made generally available, to replicate a typical IC design environment in the cloud with high performance.
A typical design environment that we see design automation teams use successfully looks like this:
