Cloud-based HPC helps Cadence design electronic chips.
An announcement from Cadence Design Systems and IBM provides a great example of the value proposition offered by cloud-based, high-performance computing (HPC). The announcement reveals that IBM Cloud HPC is being used to help Cadence engineers quickly develop chip and system design software for use in electronics products, hyper-scaling computing, 5G communication, automotive, mobile, aerospace, consumer, industrial and healthcare applications.
“For IBM clients like Cadence, demanding HPC workloads require higher utilization capabilities, and with a hybrid cloud solution, they can better manage peak workloads,” said Rohit Badlaney, GM, Industry Cloud Platforms & Solutions at IBM. “IBM Cloud HPC is designed to deliver increased storage performance, greater compute power and higher levels of security, and with these capabilities we are helping Cadence improve HPC for computational software workload performance and drive overall efficiency.”
In 2016, Cadence started its cloud adoption directives. This has since produced a hybrid, multi-cloud system which helps engineers research and develop electronics. IBM Spectrum LSF is used on this hybrid system to manage compute-intensive workloads on-premises and in the cloud.
“Leveraging IBM Cloud as part of our multi-cloud environment and IBM Spectrum LSF as the HPC workload scheduler, we’ve successfully achieved high-compute utilization, which lets us efficiently utilize our cloud budget and streamline our computational workload,” said Tarak Ray, corporate vice president and chief information officer at Cadence.
When a well-known engineering outlet such as Cadence uses cloud based HPC tools to support its large computational loads, it’s bound to turn heads. And given that this setup used both on-premises and cloud-based tools, it goes to show how the cloud can be beneficial to various engineering outlets with and without HPC tools onsite. And since Cadence reports that this setup reduced downtime while improving resiliency, performance, security, compliance and total cost of ownership, this use case is bound to impress even the biggest cloud skeptics.
