A Fast and Seamless Way to Burst to the Cloud for Peak EDA Workloads

Why Typical Hybrid Cloud Solutions Are Time-Consuming to Implement

Capacity for on-prem data centers can certainly be expanded, but doing so comes with substantial IT resources and cost. The lead time to add compute capacity on-prem is typically three to six months. As such, many companies opt for a hybrid approach that utilizes the cloud for peak workloads. However, configuring EDA workloads to burst to the cloud has traditionally been quite challenging, involving many manual steps and, often, disparate third-party tools that aren’t designed for the unique requirements of electronic design. Consider, as an example, running verification on a full chip. Say the engineer determines that 80% of the work can be done on-prem, since doing the full job would take longer than desired due to capacity limitations. Bursting to the cloud for the rest of the work would support faster completion. Once the IT team has built the hybrid solution, the engineer would have to:

• Split the design manually, designating certain blocks for the on-prem resources and others for the cloud
• Transfer the relevant design data to the cloud
• Transfer the output data from the cloud back to the on-prem resources
• Put the cloud-generated and on-prem data back together in the on-prem infrastructure for analysis and processing for the next step in the flow

This approach can be quite laborious and time consuming and adds a significant overhead to engineering productivity. 

Enhancing Semiconductor Engineering Productivity with Synopsys Cloud Hybrid

The Synopsys Cloud Hybrid Solution specifically addresses the challenges laid out above by allowing design teams to simply submit an EDA job to the scheduler on-prem and move on to their next task. Meanwhile, the secure hybrid cloud solution automatically splits the job between on-prem and cloud compute resources based on available capacity, and the jobs run simultaneously. Since all the data generated by the job is synchronized automatically and in real time between the cloud and on-prem environments, there’s no need to manually transfer data. Output data is automatically synchronized back to on-prem resources for analysis and processing. In other words, bursting to the cloud becomes seamless, significantly improving engineering productivity and savings months of IT implementation time. We estimate that this solution can cut hours of engineering overhead each day depending on the EDA workload being deployed.

Availability

The Synopsys Cloud Hybrid Solution will initially be available for early customer access via a bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) approach on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. We will release the solution for specific workloads initially, and continue to add more EDA tools from our portfolio as we validate and enable them over the next few months. Customers will be able to run multi-vendor EDA flows through this offering. The hybrid solution is the latest addition to the Synopsys Cloud platform, which delivers browser-based access to with the unique FlexEDA model for unlimited access to EDA software on demand, by the minute.