BW: NVIDIA Selects Gridware’s Codine/GRD For Management of High-Complexity EDA Environment

“The first phase of NVIDIA’s Codine/GRD implementation is to
manage all application traffic and scheduling for a “wall” of 300+
rack-mounted computers that will process much of the front end
design and simulation work for NVIDIA’s chips. “We’ve determined
that the most cost-effective way of building this part of our
computer resource is with a massive array of low-cost PCs running
the Linux operating system,” said Sura, “and Codine/GRD gives us
enormous flexibility in pushing as many as 14,000 jobs per day
through this wall. By dividing the initial phase of the design and
testing applications into thousands of small jobs that can be run
simultaneously, we can keep on adding processors ad infinitum and
thereby be able to keep up with the increasing complexity of our
final product.”

“The second phase of NVIDIA’s Codine/GRD implementation will be
to move Gridware’s Codine/GRD software to the Sun workstations and
servers that do the “back-end” portion of NVIDIA’s EDA processing.
On the Sun systems Codine/GRD will replace the LSF (Platform
Computing, Inc, Ottawa CANADA) load-leveling software that had
previously been used for resource management, tying the Linux and
Solaris platforms into a single computing resource manageable with
a single user interface.”

“The division of the workload between different classes of
machine puts each unit of work on the platform best suited for it,
while making heavy use of concurrent processing to compress the
overall end-to-end time required for NVIDIA’s EDA applications to a
practical scale. This will allow the company to continue bringing
out new generations of product every six months without putting a
big strain on the company’s budget for computer hardware and
software. “The way we’re setting up our computing resource to
utilize Linux processors together with Sun workstations and servers
is changing our whole computing model here,” said Sura. “This is an
extremely effective approach to the ‘dilemma-of-complexity’ now
being faced throughout the world of EDA, and we’re going to grow
this model for ourselves very quickly.”

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