Bringing Clarity to the Cloud

This morning, Cadence announced Clarity 3D Solver Cloud Let's talk about "Clarity 3D Solver" and "Cloud" separately, before discussing how we are bringing them together in a hybrid cloud environment.

Clarity 3D Solver is Cadence's highly scalable system analysis solution. I have written about this several times before, so if you are not familiar with the Clarity technology, a good place to start is by reading my posts:

• Bringing Clarity to System Analysis
• Under the Hood of Clarity and Celsius Solvers

We announced Cadence Cloud at DAC in 2018. Usage has grown and now there are over 175 companies taking advantage of it. Here are just a few of the posts that I have written about Cadence Cloud:

• Cadence Cloud (the original announcement)
• Scaling EDA in the Cloud
• Barefoot in a CloudBurst: Tempus on 2000+ CPUs
• TSMC, Microsoft, Cadence: Signoff in the Cloud

Cadence Cloud exists in a few different forms:

• Cloud Passport: Cadence provides cloud-ready tools and licenses, but all the day-to-day setup, management, and support is performed by the customer's own IT team.
• Cloudburst: Cadence manages the cloud environment in a turnkey manner, either fully-cloud based or hybrid (see the rest of this post for what that means).
• Palladium Cloud: Basically rent time on Palladium emulators installed in Cadence-managed datacenters.

Hybrid Cloud

Clarity 3D Solver Cloud is actually our first announcement of what we call a hybrid cloud product.

A lot of companies have on-premises (on-prem in the jargon) data centers. Some of these are very large, with literally hundreds of thousands of cores. However, in a large company with a number of designs going on simultaneously, even a large data center like that is often not enough for peak loads. Verification, in particular, is never done, so that there is always a backlog of verification jobs that can soak up any amount of capacity. Running one of the most scalable Cadence tools, like the Clarity 3D Solver, can take advantage of literally hundreds of cores but it can take a lot of waiting for a hundred cores to be available simultaneously on-prem. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just click on a menu item in the Clarity 3D Solver, and instead of waiting for those hundred cores to become available, just run the system analysis in the cloud?

Well, as of today, you can do just that.

That is what hybrid cloud means. You can run the Clarity in your on-prem data center. Or, with a couple of mouse clicks, you can switch to running in the cloud. You don't need to worry about provisioning the cloud and setting up the Clarity 3D Solver, you don't need to worry about how licenses are handled, you don't need to worry about the security of your data. Cadence has a pre-installed multi-tenant Clarity environment already set up and waiting for you. Under the hood, all the information required is packaged up and, transparent to you, securely moved to CloudBurst, and dispatched onto multiple machines. Then the results are pulled back to your design cockpit, and the design data is deleted from the cloud. It's as if you never left the on-prem cockpit of the Clarity 3D Solver. You can go straight to analyzing your results.

Most aspects of the cloud are only positive, but one pushback is how secure the design data is when using the Clarity 3D Solver in the cloud. The Clarity 3D Solver in the cloud leverages ISO/IEC 27001:2003-certified Cadence CloudBurst that follows CIS-defined security best practices and CSA recommended controls. It also meets the very strict security requirements from the foundries that we have to meet before foundries will release their IP and PDKs to the Cadence 3D Solver Cloud environment. Finally, Clarity 3D Solver Cloud only communicates simulation data, not the design data, to/from the cloud, it is encrypted in-transit and at rest, and deleted after the analysis is complete.

Virtuoso ADE Cloud

Although Cadence announced Clarity 3D Solver Cloud today, we have had a soft opening in the last few months of another hybrid cloud product: Virtuoso ADE Cloud. Virtuoso ADE is Cadence's Analog Design Environment. Part of this product is layout, which is interactive and doesn't have heavy computational requirements. But the other part is running the Spectre circuit simulator, which does, especially if the design is large. By selecting an option in Virtuoso ADE, those simulations can be run in the cloud instead of on-prem, and all the results appear back in Virtuoso ADE as if they had been generated on-prem.

Hiding the Complexity

Obviously, the aim of this approach is to hide the complexity from designers, but give them all the benefits of on-demand capacity, huge throughput, and scalability, and reduce the challenge of using the cloud to a single menu item (see the image). I once saw an interview with Morecambe and Wise, two very famous British comedians that you've probably never heard of outside of the UK. They pointed out how much rehearsal it took to make their performances look unrehearsed and ad-libbed. Hybrid cloud is a bit similar—it takes a lot of work beforehand to make it look like your analysis is all just running in the cloud as smoothly as it runs on-prem, and it is just a different choice on a drop-down menu.

So today the hybrid cloud supports Cadence's Virtuoso ADE Cloud and the Clarity 3D Solver Cloud. There will obviously be more. Any application that requires a lot of computation is a good candidate.

Cadence customers who are using the cloud today do it for the benefits of scalability, agility, and a massive variety of machines. At the same time, customers who have on-prem environments are not looking forward to learning how to transfer their environment into the cloud. Now, for Virtuoso ADE and Clarity 3D Solver, they don't have to worry, they just have to click the button and we do all the heavy lifting out of sight behind the scenes.

Learn More

Watch Cadence's Ben Gu explain the benefits of the Clarity 3D Solver Cloud in Push-Button, Hybrid to In-Cloud Simulation.

And see the product page.

 

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