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Voltaire, Synopsys reduce cycle time for semicon mask

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CIOL Bureau
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BILLERICA, & MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Voltaire Ltd, a leader in grid backbone solutions, and Synopsys Inc. are developing a high-performance compute (HPC) cluster solution for semiconductor mask data-preparation (MDP) applications. The HPC solution, which consists of the Synopsys CATS MDP solution running on a high-performance compute infrastructure with Voltaire InfiniBand and DataDirect Networks’ storage, reduced MDP turnaround time by up to 4X compared to clusters using Gigabit Ethernet.

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With advanced semiconductor design files rapidly approaching one terabyte (1TB) in size, controlling data processing efficiency and cycle time has emerged as a top challenge for the industry. The greatest impact is felt in the design data to manufacturing data translation step -- also known as mask data prep. Synopsys, supplier of the industry-leading MDP solution CATS, is focused on developing new MDP solutions to help customers reduce design-to-mask data cycle time. Toward this end, Synopsys has teamed with Voltaire, other external suppliers and internal Synopsys IT resources to deliver next-generation, high-performance MDP compute solutions that are highly scalable and reliable.

Originally developed for Synopsys in-house testing and now available to customers, the HPC solution delivers high-performance file I/O using the Lustre parallel file system from Cluster File Systems (CFS), DataDirect Networks’ S2A (Silicon Storage Appliance) and the Voltaire Grid Director 10 Gigabits/second InfiniBand switches, which use Mellanox Technologies’ InfiniBand silicon solutions. Using the HPC solution, CATS has demonstrated up to a 4X improvement over Gigabit Ethernet-based solutions. In one case, a job was completed in four hours instead of the 16 hours typically required.

"We tested many different configurations to find the optimal performance for our CATS customers," said Fabio Angelillis, vice president of engineering, Silicon Engineering Group, Synopsys. "If you use an NFS-based system with Gigabit Ethernet, for example, at a certain point you become I/O-bound and cannot extract further performance from the file system. In contrast, with a parallel file system, high-performance storage and a Voltaire InfiniBand fabric, the application benefits from the aggregate performance of multiple file servers and can scale without significant performance degradation. This HPC solution has direct applicability to our customers depending upon their needs, and we look forward to customizing a solution for them."

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