Planning Cloud Strategy for HPC and High-throughput Applications

Cloud computing is becoming an increasingly good choice for EDA, but a data-led transformation is needed to take advantage of the flexibility that public compute resources can offer and to maximize performance and cost. Cloud allows an organization to benefit from a clear return on investment that supports innovation and rapid prototyping, provided those advantages are fully exploited. The wins achievable by a well-planned hybrid cloud strategy should see reduced costs both on-premises and in the cloud. The ability to dynamically tune compute and storage resources based on business and application needs is only available in the cloud, and only if the right telemetry and data pipelines are in place to inform infrastructure decisions. In this paper we discuss how to put that plan in place and ensure that key business objectives are met as workflows are adapted and migrated to a new compute environment.

The software tool OpenFOAM is used extensively in high-performance computing (HPC) to create simulations but is known to have challenging I/O patterns. To uncover the reasons why, we profiled OpenFOAM with the Altair Breeze™ and Altair Mistral™ I/O profiling tools on the Oracle bare metal cloud. The results detailed in this white paper provide a clear picture about why OpenFOAM performs slowly at times and highlight key areas for improvement.

Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron or particle accelerator. It works like a giant microscope, harnessing the power of electrons to produce bright light that scientists can use to study anything from fossils to jet engines to viruses and vaccines. Because Diamond Light Source handles a wider variety of workloads than many, performance of both in-house and third-party applications is vital. The team, which employs Altair® Grid Engine® for workload management, used Altair Mistral™ to identify straightforward improvements that could be made to improve performance and cut down runtime.

This paper presents an overview of the work by the Wellcome Sanger Institute to make one of their cancer pipelines portable and to tune it for cloud deployment using the Altair Breeze™ and Altair Mistral™ I/O profiling tools. With the insight from the tools we were able to tune the cloud configuration to boost speed by 20% with a cost reduction of 10%.

We worked with the team at the U.K.'s STFC Hartree Centre to assess and improve the performance of a number of commonly used HPC applications. They used Altair Breeze™ to profile and improve DL_POLY, a general-purpose classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulation software developed at STFC's Daresbury Laboratory. This paper presents the initial findings and performance improvements that have been submitted to the DL_POLY development repository. By looking at the I/O patterns using Breeze the Hartree Centre was able to reduce simulation software run time by at least 8% with a relatively small investment of time.

Semiconductor firms rely on software tools for all phases of the chip design process, from system-level design to logic simulation and physical layout. Given the enormous investment in tools, design talent, and infrastructure, even minor improvements in server farm efficiency can significantly impact the bottom line. As a result, verification engineers and IT managers are constantly looking for new sources of competitive advantage. Workload management plays a crucial role in helping design teams share limited resources, boost simulation throughput, and maximize productivity. In this paper, we discuss six valuable techniques to help improve design center productivity.