Welcome back to our series on cloud verification solutions. This is part two of a three-part blog—you can read part one here.
The high-performance computing (HPC) market continues to grow. Analysts say that the HPC market will reach almost $11 billion by 2020—that’s an annual growth rate of almost 20%. Cloud providers and other related companies are putting more and more resources into building solutions for this rapidly growing HPC market, which is of great interest to the EDA community.
All of this talk is leading to action—cloud providers are increasing their attention to HPC, which in turn helps create an EDA-appropriate environment for users in the cloud. It’s also a nice confidence boost to the verification and semiconductor design team—it shows them that their needs are being addressed, and that there may be better options for them to do their future work in the cloud.
Now, if you’re in verification—as this is the functional verification blog—how can the cloud help you? There’s a couple of important things to keep in mind as you do your research.
Make sure you’re fully aware of your long-term needs as well as your immediate needs before you partner with an EDA vendor. Just because something works for you now doesn’t mean it’ll work for you in the future. Companies and goals evolve; make sure you’re not getting stuck with subpar tools because you had simple needs when you wrote up your contracts.
Another thing to be aware of is a given provider’s expertise with variable computing requirements. You don’t want to be a new company’s guinea pig with something this vital to your workflow. Keep an eye out for:
1. Awareness of the best practices associated with creating a secure cloud environment
2. Products that are validated as cloud-ready
3. Experience selecting compute and storage instances in the cloud using EDA workload data
4. The ability to facilitate cloud orchestration
Beyond those things, make sure that your prospective EDA partner has plans to improve their cloud solutions, and to create new cloud solutions, in the future. You want a partner who will take this as seriously as you take it—don’t settle for anything less.
Now, you may be wondering where this is all going.
Tune in next time for our thrilling finale!