Measuring Success in Semiconductor Design Optimization, What Metrics Matter?
There are few fields in the world as competitive as semiconductor design exploration and verification. Teams might run tens of millions of compute jobs in a single day on their quest to bring new chips to market first, requiring vast quantities of compute and increasingly, cloud and emulator resources, as well as expensive EDA licenses, and the all-important resource, time. In this roundtable, experts will discuss the license-, job-, compute- and host-based metrics that the world’s leading semiconductor companies measure and tune for, highlighting the optimization strategies that edge out the competition and drive up profitability.
Conference Presentations
Chip Design in the Cloud with Annapurna Labs
As a chip design company, time-to-market and engineering efficiency are the most critical and expensive metrics upon which to focus. With this in mind, the team at Annapurna Labs chose Altair Accelerator™ as their job scheduler for front-end and back-end workflows. As a feature within Accelerator, Rapid Scaling unused compute resources was developed with Annapurna Labs to add structure and efficiency to scaling AWS compute resources, shorten time to results, and change the development model to Continuous Integration.
Webinars
Where to Begin: HPC and Cloud Computing Models for Engineers
In this session, cloud expert Rick Watkins presents three actionable HPC and cloud models designed to optimize innovation potential and longtime ROI, whether your team is small and nimble or maintains its own large compute infrastructure. Engineers interested in boosting performance with HPC will come away with an understanding of what HPC and cloud model could be right for them – as well as a high-level appreciation for the critical role that IT infrastructure optimization plays in maintaining your team’s competitive edge, and all the complexity involved in making appear simple.
Future.Industry 2021
Accelerating Design for VLSI
As an IP design and licensing company, time-to-market and engineering efficiency are CEVA’s most critical and valued metrics. With this in mind, the team at CEVA selected the Altair Accelerator™ job scheduler for their VLSI workflows.
Customer Stories
Rapid Chip Design in the Cloud
License-first approach to scheduling enhances resource management
Customer Stories
Saving Serious Money with License-first Scheduling
Altair's Stuart Taylor, director of enterprise computing core development, gives you an inside look at the license-first scheduling strategy the world's top technology companies use to increase the amount of high-performance, high-throughput computing jobs that can be executed across a finite resource set.
Conference Presentations
Bringing Cost as Close as Possible to Exact Demand
"Watch your money," says Altair chief scientist and Runtime founder Andrea Casotto, explaining how Rapid Scaling can bring the cost of your cloud computing as close as possible to exact demand.
HPC Summit 2020
Altair for HPC and Cloud Applications
In the data center and in the cloud, Altair’s industry-leading HPC tools let you orchestrate, visualize, optimize, and analyze your most demanding workloads.
Brochures
PBS Works Documentation
Documentation for PBS Works Products, including Release Notes, Programmer's Guides, User's Guides, and Administrator's Guides
Documentation
Webinar: GPU accelerated Aerodynamics CFD using Altair ultraFluidX
Most traditional simulations take too long to complete and takes significant toll on the vehicle manufacturer’s capability to arrive at an optimal design that considers styling and aerodynamic performance. In this webinar, we introduce you to Altair’s ultraFluidX, a GPU based Lattice Boltzmann solver that delivers unbeatable performance and overnight transient simulations of full vehicle aerodynamics on a single server. We will discuss the challenges in executing a full vehicle transient simulation and demonstrate how ultraFluidX technology and workflow helps you to overcome many of these with tremendous ease. We will also discuss some of the unique features that helps you perform multiple design analysis cycles with an unprecedented level of automation.
Webinars
Enterprise Computing Technical Day
Presentation by Zohar Levy & Ketan Kulkarni, EC Experts at the ATCx in Israel, Netanya on October 30, 2019.
Conference Presentations
Forecast Your Software Licensing Future with Altair SAO Predict
Altair SAO enables you to visualize and analyze global software inventories and utilization rates across facilities, divisions, departments, and users. With SAO, it’s easy to pinpoint underutilized assets for better business planning and forecasting. Because we have deep domain expertise in not only HPC but also business analytics and software licensing systems, Altair is uniquely qualified to offer powerful SAO solutions tailored to the individual requirements of each organization.
The Altair SAO Predict module is a “what-if” simulator — an entirely new approach to exploring configuration alternatives using a virtual license manager and the data generated by SAO.
In this webinar, SAO expert Alhad Joshi, Altair's Vice President of Enterprise Analytics Solutions, showcases the benefits of using SAO and SAO Predict in a global organization.
Webinars
Multi-Physics Design and Optimization of a Complex Radar System
Today, most products are complex mechatronic combinations of advanced technologies, mixing electrical parts with controllers and embedded software. To efficiently manage innovative products, organizations are turning to a Model-Based Development approach for concept studies, control design, multi-domain system simulation and optimization. To meet this demand, Altair’s simulation and optimization suite aims to transform design and decision-making throughout product lifecycles with their multi-disciplinary software tools and consultancy services.
Technical Document
Altair Accelerator Datasheet
Altair Accelerator™ is the industry’s fastest enterprise job scheduler, with high-performance hierarchical scheduling and scalable, event-driven architecture for the highest throughput. Accelerator maximizes capacity utilization and is capable of running millions of jobs per day.
Brochures
Introduction to Altair Accelerator
Accelerator is an enterprise-grade job scheduler designed for distributed high-performance computing (HPC) environments. As a highly adaptable solution, it is capable of managing compute infrastructures from small dedicated server farms to complex distributed HPC environments.
The Plus package of Accelerator (Accelerator Plus) also includes a hierarchical scheduler architected to off-load the base scheduler, enabling greater throughput, better license and resource utilization, and more flexible scheduler usage models.
Product Overview Videos
Altair Accelerator Demo
Accelerator is an enterprise-grade job scheduler designed for distributed high-performance computing (HPC) environments. As a highly adaptable solution, it is capable of managing compute infrastructures from small dedicated server farms to complex distributed HPC environments. The Plus package of Accelerator (Accelerator Plus) also includes a hierarchical scheduler architected to off-load the base scheduler, enabling greater throughput, better license and resource utilization, and more flexible scheduler usage models. View the demo to learn more.
Product Overview Videos
Altair Accelerator Plus Demo
The Plus package of Accelerator (Accelerator Plus) also includes a hierarchical scheduler architected to off-load the base scheduler, enabling greater throughput, better license and resource utilization, and more flexible scheduler usage models.
Product Overview Videos
Inphi Corporation Speeds Up Semiconductor Design with Altair Accelerator
Inphi produces high-speed semiconductor components and optical subsystems that enable big data to move quickly throughout the globe, both inside data centers and between broadly distributed computing facilities.
In today’s competitive semiconductor design and electronic design automation (EDA) industry, winning organizations leverage high-performance computing (HPC) and high-end design software to stay ahead of the game. As these tools are often expensive, maximizing utilization to ensure the design and development process runs quickly and efficiently — and that everything stays within budget — is the key to delivering innovative technologies to market faster than competitors.
The team at Inphi understands the importance of HPC and EDA software performance optimization better than most. They evaluated several competing solutions before selecting Altair Accelerator, which stood out among the competition for superior performance and Altair’s reputation for excellent customer service.
Customer Stories
Workload Scalability with Accelerator and Accelerator Plus
View this product demo video featuring the workload management tools Altair Accelerator and Altair Accelerator Plus to learn more about the software.
Use Cases
Altair Rapid Scaling
Getting started with Altair Rapid Scaling, a high-throughput, cost-conscious job scheduler robust enough to meet the demands of today's semiconductor, EDA and high-performance computing workloads in the cloud.
Product Overview Videos
Short-running Jobs Can Help Optimize Your Resource Utilization
Semiconductor companies typically run jobs by queuing them up, then using a job scheduler to dispatch them onto available cores in server farms while pulling EDA tool licenses from a license server. There are two primary goals facing organizations, and they’re somewhat at odds with each other: first, maximizing the utilization of server farms and software licenses and second, running jobs with minimal latency so users aren’t delayed.
The easiest way to satisfy the requirements of high utilization and low latency is to maximize the number of short-duration jobs. Just as it is easier to fill a bucket with sand than it is with large rocks, short jobs give the scheduler increased flexibility in what jobs to run and when. Short jobs will not block or occupy a resource for long periods and are therefore not likely to impede the progress of higher-priority jobs arriving in the queue.
Altair Accelerator™ is an agile, fully featured scheduler optimized for today’s EDA workloads. The most important difference between Accelerator and other popular schedulers is its event-driven architecture, which allows it to schedule a new job immediately when compute resources and software licenses become available.
White Papers
Meeting Job Scheduling Challenges for Organizations of All Sizes
Every semiconductor design group uses some sort of job scheduler, whether it is selected by a corporate IT department or by the group itself. At a high level, the function of a job scheduler is simple: Be aware of what is in the queue and what hardware and software license resources are available and make good decisions about what jobs to schedule when. In practice there are a several subtle issues that are just as important, including job mix, prioritization, and ease of support.
While every company is unique, the issues surrounding job scheduling are often related to company size or, more accurately, the size of the compute farm and design teams.
Altair Accelerator™ is a high-throughput, enterprise-grade job scheduler designed to meet the complex demands of semiconductor design, EDA, and high-performance computing (HPC). It’s a highly adaptable solution capable of managing compute infrastructures from small, dedicated server farms to complex, distributed environments.
White Papers
Rapidly Advancing Electronics: Altair Solutions Enable Rapid Growth for Wired Connectivity Leader Kandou
Kandou is a rapidly growing leader in fast, energy-efficient wired connectivity. Its disruptive technologies include chip products and IP solutions designed to accelerate the evolution of electronics and enable increasingly small, energy efficient, cost-effective devices.
Faced with rapid growth, the team at Kandou needed to manage workloads and licensing for their expensive EDA tools. We set Kandou’s team up with Altair Accelerator™ for job scheduling and Altair Monitor™ for real-time license monitoring and management.
Customer Stories
Predicting Global Weather & Climate - New NCAR HPC System Expected to Achieve Over 3x Faster Performance
HPC systems at NCAR power the science behind global weather and climate prediction and research. In early 2021, NCAR announced that their Cheyenne supercomputer, located at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center, will be replaced by a new HPE Cray EX system with 3.5x more processing power, up to 19.87 petaflops with a combination of CPU and GPU nodes. The new system will include efficient workload management and scheduling by Altair® PBS Professional® and Altair Accelerator™ Plus.
Customer Stories
A Cost-benefit Look at Open-source vs. Commercial HPC Workload Managers
High-performance computing (HPC) fuels scientific discovery and innovation across multiple industries. The combination of large datasets, advanced simulation techniques, and machine learning helps organizations generate insights that would not be possible without modern HPC infrastructure.
Given HPC’s outsized role in driving business results, selecting the right management software is critical. This is especially true in commercial organizations where time is money. In this paper, we discuss the pros and cons of open-source software in HPC and make the case for commercial workload management. While open-source workload managers are fine in some situations, they can present disadvantages in production environments.
White Papers
Altair Accelerator 2021.1 Dashboard – Demo Video
The Altair Accelerator job scheduler has a web user interface (UI) that allows users and administrators to view queued and running jobs, status of execution hosts, and many other important statuses of the cluster that is being managed. The dashboard page in the UI can be very useful for system admins as they monitor the status of Accelerator function and cluster loading. The dashboard is auto-refreshing and shows you at a glance the most recent status.
Quick Start
Altair Enterprise Computing Solutions with SUSE Enterprise Linux
In her presentation at SC21, Dr. Rosemary Francis explains how developers and administrators get the most out of their workload managers using the wide range of Altair enterprise computing solutions running SUSE Enterprise Linux.
Conference Presentations
Six Smarter Scheduling Techniques for Optimizing EDA Productivity
Semiconductor firms rely on software tools for all phases of the chip design process, from system-level design to logic simulation and physical layout. Given the enormous investment in tools, design talent, and infrastructure, even minor improvements in server farm efficiency can significantly impact the bottom line. As a result, verification engineers and IT managers are constantly looking for new sources of competitive advantage.
Workload management plays a crucial role in helping design teams share limited resources, boost simulation throughput, and maximize productivity. In this paper, we discuss six valuable techniques to help improve design center productivity.
White Papers
CEA Speeds Up EDA for Research - Powering R&D at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission
CEA Tech, the Grenoble-based technology research unit for the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) is a global leader in miniaturization technologies that enable smart digital systems and secure, energy-efficient solutions for industry. Its multidisciplinary team of experts tackles critical challenges in healthcare, energy, digital migration, and more in world-class facilities. CEA Tech needed to improve license utilization and ensure that licenses are freed quickly to be made available to queued jobs. The team sped up R&D using Altair® Accelerator™ for EDA job scheduling and Altair® Monitor™ for real-time license monitoring. One series of single-user simulations showed a speed increase of more than 4.5x using Accelerator.
Customer Stories