Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

February 12, 2008 — Today's integrated circuit designs pack more functionality into chip real estate than ever before. These complex designs require a corresponding increase in verification complexity and Synopsys VCS is an excellent tool to tackle the job. Running VCS on a compute grid maximizes verification throughput and system resources. You might be thinking about upgrading the systems in your compute farm to more powerful, energy-efficient, multicore x64 systems, like the quad-core Intel Xeon systems from Sun. However, with design cycles of two to three years, you need the reliability and stability you've become accustomed to with the Solaris OS. Now you can have both.

Energy-Efficient Power for VCS Compute Farms

Synopsys VCS takes advantage of multiple cores in the compute farm by delivering faster verification performance. The Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 servers feature dual- and quad-core Intel Xeon processors. With large on-die caches and high clock speeds these processors offer high performance and throughput. The Sun Fire X4150 server support two CPUs for up to 8 cores and the Sun Fire X4450 servers supports four CPUs for a maximum of 16 cores. All of Sun's x64 servers run the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), Linux, Windows, and VMware.

The impressive power of these systems makes them attractive for compute farms, but a key differentiator is energy efficiency. Every company is striving to reduce costs where ever possible and datacenter power is a primary target for cost-cutting measures, driving IT manager to choose systems that use less power and cooling, especially when idle. The Intel processors in the Sun Fire X4150 and X4450 servers incorporate new power management capabilities that limit power to unused execution units in each core, which helps to reduce power and cooling requirements. Highly efficient power supplies, variable speed fans, and front-to-back airflow complete the package to effectively cool the system and reduce power use. To maximize uptime, systems include redundant hot-swappable fans, hot-swappable drives, and can be configured with redundant hot-swappable power supplies.

Long-Term Reliability and Stability

Until recently, if you wanted to run Synopsys VCS on Sun's x64 systems, the supported OS was Linux. However, many corporations prefer commercially-supported operating systems. With long-term design cycles of two to three years, the last thing you want to deal with is the unpredictable releases of an unsupported open source operating system. The Solaris OS general availability lifespan is at least four years and six months, with periodic updates that incorporate a set of tested, integrated patches along with new features and support for new hardware. With the Solaris OS, you know that you'll be working on a stable OS for the life of your design cycle.

Verification of today's complex designs can entail hundreds of tests each running close to an hour or more, therefore anything that enhances the reliability of the system means faster verification and time to market. Solaris Predictive Self Healing keeps VCS tests running by enabling the system to heal itself. An innovative capability in the Solaris 10 OS, it automatically diagnoses, isolates, and recovers from many hardware and application faults. As a result, VCS and essential system services can continue uninterrupted in the event of software failures, major hardware component failures, and even software mis-configuration problems.

Synopsys VCS

Synopsys VCS unifies advanced technologies, including testbench automation, assertion checking, and coverage analysis, all integrated with high performance simulation — enabling engineers to detect more bugs in less time and reach a higher rate of success on the first-pass of silicon. By natively integrating these technologies within its unique, single-compiler Native Testbench architecture, the VCS solution delivers up to five times faster verification performance compared with using multiple, stand-alone tools. Having faster access to data in the cache memory enables VCS to deliver higher performance. The Solaris OS enhances this advantage by enabling VCS to access over 2 GB of memory on x64 systems.

"Sun and Synopsys have been long-time collaborators, offering a breadth of solutions for complex design and verification challenges" says Swami Venkat, Senior Director of Verification Marketing, Synopsys. With the port of Synopsys VCS to Solaris 10 for x64 systems, you can benefit from the performance, cost-effectiveness, and power efficiency of x64 systems — with the confidence you've developed in the Solaris OS.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops technical marketing communications for the technology industry.