Stephen Slater, Chris Mueth, 2020.06.08

Tom DeMuer & Maziar Farahmand

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• EM simulations Higher frequencies & finer meshes = larger matrices to solve

• Circuit simulationsMore complexity, more variables to sweep & more corners to cover

Compute power is

less expensive than

engineering hours &

schedule delays

How much Time and Risk can you cut from your schedule

by getting more simulations finished in less time?

Distributed (parallel) simulation is supported for EM

& Circuit simulation engines today!

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I F I T ’ S H A R D T O A C C E S S – I T W O N T B E W I D E LY - A D O P T E D B Y U S E R S

User on

WindowsUser on

WindowsUser on

WindowsUser on

Windows

Remote Session

on Linux

Remote Session

on Big Windows

Machine

Individual/Separate 8-pack licenses for:

• FEM

• Momentum

• Linear S-Param

• Harmonic Balance

• Transient Convolution

• Circuit Envelope

• Channel Sim

• DDR Bus Sim

• GoldenGate Simulators

Manual transfer

Hard to check status

GB of simulation results to manual transfer

Can’t continue work until simulation is finished,

else design has branched and have to merge.

LSF

Queue

On-Premises Compute Cluster

Simulation licensing connectivity

Finite resources – how to scale at peak times?

Manual transfer

User-experience affected by network latency

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As straight-forward as:

1. Simplified Licensing – New HPC 1-pack ‘Droplets’

2. Ease of Accessibility – New web-service to easily hand-off simulation jobs

3. Turn-key Cloud Solutions – New partnerships with fully-managed cloud platform vendors

T H E E A S I E S T PAT H T O H P C D I S T R I B U T E D S I M U L AT I O N

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T H E E A S I E S T PAT H T O H P C D I S T R I B U T E D S I M U L AT I O N

Sim Service

LSF

Queue

On-Premises Compute Cluster

User on Windows

/ LinuxUser on Windows

/ LinuxUser on Windows

/ LinuxUser on Windows

/ LinuxUser on Windows

/ Linux

Single-Machine with Many Cores

Cloud HPC Deployment

Simulation setup on local machine

Simulate directly to Sim Service – creates jobs and transfers

necessary files automatically to all 3 deployment options

Check status of job either in ADS, or via web page

Logging-out of ADS locally, doesn’t end the simulation

Downloads finished simulations automatically when the ADS

workspace is re-opened

Sim Service

Sim Service

Singular

User-Experience

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T H E E M S I M U L AT I O N U S E - C A S E

Web-Service

• Example • RFPro FEM simulation requesting 32 freq pts.

• Memory required for FEM solve is 20GB

• User-set parallel jobs = 8

• HW resources need 8 x 20GB memory to

solve 8 jobs in parallel (4 freq pts per job)

• PathWave ADS 2021 (Release date: July 2020)

RFPro / SIPro / PIPro / PEPro will support DesignCloud

• Install DesignCloud Sim Service on destination HPC system

• Momentum, FEM and SIPro simulations can perform parallel

jobs by dividing up the frequency points to solve.

• Momentum, FEM and SIPro simulators are multi-threaded,

this speedup is free

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• New Droplet ‘1-pack’ HPC licenses

• A droplet allows 1 additional parallel job to be started

• Droplets stack linearly to achieve the parallelism desired

• Example:• For 8 parallel jobs, 1 simulator license and 7 HPC droplets will be

checked out

• If a user requests 20 jobs, but only 8 droplets are available in the

license pool, 9 jobs will be launched instead

• Product Numbers:

• W3029E Circuit Sim HPC 1-Pack

• W3039E EM HPC 1-Pack

S AV E T I M E - R E D U C E R I S K – A D O P T H P C

DesignCloud

Dynamic

Enterprise

Agreements

Higher HPC

Asset Utilization

Simple HPC

Licensing

Cloud scaling for

peak demand

Enabling Predictive, Productive Design Cycles

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T U R N - K E Y S O L U T I O N S T H R O U G H PA R T N E R S H I P S

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DesignCloud

Sim Service Use-Model

Automatic transfer of files

Remote Desktop Use-model

Manual transfer of files

GUI latency

Click a Tile to spool up

the number of machines

required

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• Install PathWave ADS 2021

• Install DesignCloud SimService on HPC destination system (Keysight to provide guidance)

• Request sufficient number of HPC ‘Droplet’ licenses

• Request Nimbix evaluation account, if interested in testing Cloud HPC

• Select a suitable testcase for speedup

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• DesignCloud : A program name to describe all of PathWave Design’s distributed simulation solutions, and particularly the way we do it.

• Sim Service : Becoming synonymous with DesignCloud, this is a new software web-service that can be installed, to provide an interface

between the simulation-user on their local machine, and the middleware that controls a cluster or cloud hardware. This web-service is

specific to the needs of simulation. It handles user simulation requests and constraints, and becomes a simulation proxy – making sure that

simulations (and the parallel jobs that are spawned from them) are completed successfully. It aids the transfer of files and monitoring the

progress of simulation, it allows the user to decouple their local machine from the simulation execution. It is what makes the user-

experience EASY.

• Middleware : Software that acts as a bridge between an operating system and applications, especially on a network. In this instance we

speak of Job-schedulers like LSF, Slurm, SiteCluster etc. And also hardware resource arbiters (spooling up cloud instances), such as the

proprietary software from Nimbix (JARVICE) and Rescale

• Simulation Manager : Within PathWave ADS and GoldenGate, this long-standing feature is used for performing distributed simulation for

circuit simulators only. Simulation manager is a simulation proxy, but it does not have a web-service interface. The roadmap is to enable

connection between Simulation Manager and Sim Service, to enable easy parallel simulation in the cloud and on-prem, across Operating

Systems and across file-management systems.

• HPC : High-performance computing (HPC) is the umbrella term for use of parallel processing for running advanced application programs

efficiently, reliably and quickly.

• Cloud HPC : A use-case for the Cloud, whereby multiple cloud resources are provisioned for the purposes of HPC.

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• 1 Thread or 1 Core? : Thread = a software concept. A Core = a piece of hardware, multiple cores make up a CPU component, but each

core is a processor in its own right. The OS will take the threads created by a process and schedule them on a core. A modern OS manages

about 2000 threads at any time and schedule those round-robin on available cores. Thread scheduling overhead is low but non-negligible. A

Core can process a single instruction stream. The OS lets a CPU point to an instruction in memory and let it loose, however after some time

it will interrupt that and point to another instruction stream. Each of those instruction streams are part of a thread. So, you will get optimal

speed-up when there are multiple cores available on the same node, that can maximize the benefits of multithreading to work!

• Job : This is the unit of measure for parallelism. An EM simulation, may split up the work to be done, into X number of jobs. If you have 8

compute nodes each with 4 core CPUs, you should not request more than 8 parallel jobs at 4 threads each. If there are not enough compute

nodes available for all jobs to be started at once, middle-ware may hold the job queue, until the # of nodes requested come available.

• HPC 1-pack Droplet : The license that unlocks 1 additional job to be run in parallel. Licenses are stacked to reach the parallelism desired.

E.g. 7 HPC droplets allows for 8 parallel jobs. There are two types - EM droplets, and Circuit Sim droplets.

• Node : A node is a point of intersection/connection within a network. Typically referring to a specific piece of hardware with a unique IP

address that is connected to the network. What can be confusing, is that a single large machine can be configured by software to represent

several independent IP addresses, with each of these nodes containing m cores.