Mentor Graphics Corporation

Electronic Design Automation Leader Shortens Time-to-Market and Improves Product Quality with Sun Grid Engine

Mentor Graphics Corporation is a technology leader in electronic design automation (EDA), providing software and hardware design solutions that enable companies to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. The company offers innovative products and solutions that help engineers overcome the design challenges they face in the increasingly complex worlds of board and chip design.

Customer Challenges

Accelerate time to market
Improve product quality
Complete larger and more complex regression work in less time
Extend value of grid computing to Microsoft Windows platform
Better utilize existing heterogeneous computing resources including Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, AIX and Windows platforms
Hold down increase in growth of new hardware budget

Solution

A Sun-powered grid for product development, serving hundreds of engineering users and performing more than 13 million jobs per month.

Business Results

Higher quality products
Meet scheduled release dates with all identified quality improvements incorporated
Build systems up to 5X faster
Achieve 150% greater system utilization, to reduce annual budget increases for new systems
Reduce power, cooling and space requirements

Products and Services

Story Details

Mentor Graphics Corporation (Mentor Graphics) grows its business primarily by providing electronics and semiconductor companies with new products developed internally. Accelerating time to market and improving product quality are therefore key goals at the 4,100-employee company. A significant constraint upon both is compute power. Before a product is released, it must be put through thousands of tests, which run on the company’s available hardware. The faster tests can be performed, the faster it can reach the marketplace.

Mentor Graphics had a test environment of individual servers and workstations that ran manually-managed tests sequentially. A thousand tests could take as long as 3.5 days. To accelerate the process the company added new systems to this environment, pushing up the budget for new systems, as well as costs to maintain.

"Power, cooling and space are primary concerns because of the size and number of computers that we need to do business," says Rich Monahan, IT engineering services director, Mentor Graphics. "By slowing the rate of new machine acquisition, we lower the power, the cooling and the space that we need."

To manage the budget and dramatically increase processor utilization and the amount of compute capacity available, Mentor Graphics decided to try grid computing. Its first grid experiment took advantage of the open source version of Sun Grid Engine. More recently the company migrated to a licensed and supported version—Sun Grid Engine 6—due to the critical nature of the solution, and the extensive adoption and size of the deployment.

Mentor Graphics has installed the grid software at nine of its 30 global sites with Sun Grid Engine, with plans to bring more online over time. The grid runs on a heterogeneous environment with UNIX, Linux and Windows operating systems. Many of the computers running in the grid are Sun x64 servers—Sun Fire X4100, Sun Fire X2100 and Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers with AMD Opteron processors. As more processing capacity is needed, the Sun Grid Engine finds the resources among the available processors joined to the local grid.

The grid now performs more than 13 million jobs per month, allowing engineers to know how changes will affect their products while enabling them to meet the committed release date. Performing this many jobs monthly would not have been possible without the grid. Because of more efficient utilization of computing resources, Mentor Graphics can run more tests. The result is higher quality products than ever before and on-time product releases.

" The grid environment has sped up our regression tests by 500 percent. For any development work requiring full regressions, it improves regression and analysis from around 24 hours down to 4 hours. The impact of this kind of improvement isn’t simply limited to faster turnarounds. It keeps the entire development flow far better optimized while improving overall product quality. "

— Randy Misustin , Engineering Director, ModelSim, Mentor Graphics

Convinced of the benefits of grid computing, Mentor Graphics' engineers are extending the value of grid computing to the company's customers, many of whom have distributed computing environments. Engineers are making products grid friendly so that Mentor Graphics' customers can speed up their own processes and enjoy some of the values that Mentor Graphics has realized with its Sun Grid Engine.

The Sun grid also improves processor utilization by over 150 percent. This has allowed Mentor Graphics to flatten the budget for new computer equipment and avoid the expected annual budget increases that otherwise would have been unavoidable. Reductions in the growth of power, cooling and space have followed, helping Mentor Graphics continue to grow profitably while sparing the environment. That’s a solution that can continue to meet the company’s needs for years to come.