[Beowulf] Mobos for portable use

[Hamilton, Scott]

The open source electric software website is http://www.staticfreesoft.com and also https://www.gnu.org/software/electric/   

I have used electric and it has a lot of very powerful features, and seems more stable and streamlined than the commercial products from cadence.

Thanks,
Scott


Scott Hamilton
Solution Architect II
Atos Big Data & Security - NAO
(573)324-7124
scott.hamilton at atos.net


-----Original Message-----
From: Beowulf [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Lukasz Salwinski
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2017 11:52 AM
To: beowulf at beowulf.org
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Mobos for portable use

On 01/20/2017 09:14 AM, Hamilton, Scott wrote:
> I am not sure how far they have come, but the open source Electric design suite was working on MPI based parallelization of their simulation and fabrication processes.  It might be worth checking into.
>
> Scott
>
> Scott Hamilton
> Solution Architect II
> Atos Big Data & Security - NAO
> (573)324-7124
> scott.hamilton at atos.net

uh.. do you have a less generic pointer ? all I can find is software for house wiring design ;o)

there's also:
  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/

lukasz

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Beowulf [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Lux, 
> Jim (337C)
> Sent: Friday, January 20, 2017 10:31 AM
> To: Lukasz Salwinski; beowulf at beowulf.org
> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Mobos for portable use
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 1/20/17, 8:07 AM, "Beowulf on behalf of Lukasz Salwinski"
> <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of lukasz at mbi.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
>> On 01/19/2017 09:11 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/19/17, 4:29 PM, "Beowulf on behalf of Lukasz Salwinski"
>>> <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of lukasz at mbi.ucla.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 01/19/2017 02:09 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>>> From: Beowulf [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of 
>>>>> Andrew M.A. Cater
>>>>> Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2017 12:49 PM
>>>>> To: beowulf at beowulf.org
>>>>> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Mobos for portable use
>>>> [...]
>>>>> (I just found that at least a while ago, Xilinx supported clusters 
>>>>> for some of  their design tools.. Since right now the design I'm 
>>>>> working with takes an hour to synthesize (on a single machine), 
>>>>> I'm going to look further - it has been a real rate limiter in the 
>>>>> lab, because it makes the test, new design, load, test cycle a lot
>>>>> longer.)
>>>>
>>>> it looks like current (vivado 16.4) synthesis program hasn't been 
>>>> parallelized - it's strictly single threaded and so uses just one 
>>>> core... :o/  I've recently benchmarked a few i5 & i7 workstations
>>>> - there seem to be very little differences (maybe 10-20%) between 
>>>> CPUs released over last ~4-5 years :o/
>>>>
>>>> lukasz
>>>
>>> yeah, on further investigation, the parallelized part is the 
>>> iterative ³try lots of options² which isn¹t much use.
>>>
>>> I¹ve got the design, I don¹t need to optimize a parameter.
>>>
>>
>> to my knowledge, parts of place/route use more than one core. I'm 
>> guessing it might be because these were, from the very beginning, 
>> series of independent MonteCarlo-like runs that were easy to parallelize.
>>
>
> Makes sense.. way back in the 80s, their earliest tools used simulated annealing for place and route (and it took all night on a 80286 based computer, for a VERY small FPGA like the XC2064, back when folks were looking to maybe, sometime, get down to micron feature sizes). but schemes like that are very amenable to parallelization.  They could easily run multiple threads without having to spend a lot of software development time.  Splitting it into multiple machines (i.e. a cluster) is a lot harder, especially if their internal software architecture wasn't set up for that.
>
> Surprising though.. given the number of people doing designs, and how long it takes to run for not very complex designs on the latest parts (something that would fill the largest Virtex 7 must take days), you'd think that they'd work on it.  time is very much money.
>
> Maybe that's where folks like synopsys come in. You pay the big bucks for the tools and it runs on that cluster.
>
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  Lukasz Salwinski                             PHONE:        310-825-1402
  UCLA-DOE Institute                             FAX:        310-206-3914
  UCLA, Los Angeles                            EMAIL: lukasz at mbi.ucla.edu
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