BlueXP Blog

Chip Design and the Azure Cloud: An Azure NetApp Files Story

Semiconductor, or chip, design firms are most interested in time to market (TTM); TTM is often predicated upon the time it takes for workloads, such as chip design validation, and pre-foundry work, like tape-out, to completeThat said, the more bandwidth available to the server farm, the better. Azure NetApp Files (ANF) is the ideal solution for meeting both the high bandwidth and low latency storage needs of this most demanding industry.  Read on to discover why you should consider this HPC on Azure solution.

More bandwidth means more jobs may be run in parallelmore checks performed simultaneously, more, more, more, all without the added expense of time. ANF’s quality of service offering allows the scale out to 200, 500, 1000 concurrent jobs, as various Azure customers have done, without effecting run time.    

Read on to see the options made available to the semiconductor/chip industry when running their environments within Azure atop Azure NetApp Files.  

Please note that all test scenarios documented in this paper are the result of running a standard industry benchmark for electronic design automation (EDA). 

All test scenarios documented in this paper are the result of standard industry benchmark we ran for electronic design automation (EDA) on Azure NetApp Files. 

 Configurations

Scenario 

Volumes 

Clients 

SLES15 D16s_v3 

One 

1 

1 

Two 

6 

24 

Three 

12 

24 

 Scenario One answers the most basic question: How far can a single volume be driven?  We ran Scenarios Two and Three to evaluate the limits of a single Azure NetApp Files endpoint looking for potential benefits in terms I/O upper limits and/or latency. 

 Scenario Results 

Scenario 

I/O Rate 

at 2ms 

I/O Rate 

at the Edge 

Throughput 

at 2ms 

Throughput 

at the Edge 

1 Volume 

39,601 

49,502 

692MiB/s 

866MiB/s 

6 Volumes 

255,613 

317,000 

4,577MiB/s 

5,568MiB/s 

12 Volumes 

256,612 

319,196 

4,577MiB/s 

5,709MiB/s 

Scenario Results Explained 

  • Single volume: This represents the most basic application configuration; as such, it is the baseline scenario for follow-on test scenarios. 
  • volumesThis scenario demonstrates a linear increase (600%) relative to the single volume workload. 
    • More information about this configuration: In most cases, all volumes within a single virtual network are accessed over a single ip address, which was the case in this instance.
  • 12 volumes: This scenario demonstrates a general decrease in latency over the 6 volumes scenario, but without a corresponding increase in achievable throughput.  

Pictures are Worth a Thousand Words:

 

The Layout of the Tests 

Test Scenario 

Total Number of Directories 

Total Number of Files 

Single Volume 

88,000 

880,000 

volumes 

568,000 

5,680,000 

12 volumes 

568,000 

5,680,000 

The complete workload is a mixture of concurrently running functional and physical phases and, as such, overall represents a typical flow from one set of EDA tools to another.   

The functional phase consists of initial specifications and logical design. The physical phase takes place when converting the logical design into a physical chip. During the sign-off and tape-out phases, final checks are completed, and the design is delivered to a foundry for manufacturing. Each of these phases present differently when it comes to storage, as described below. 

The functional phases are metadata intensive—think file stat and access calls—though they do include a mixture of both sequential and random read and write I/O as well. Although metadata operations are effectively without size, the read and write operations range between less than 1K and 16K; he majority of reads are between 4K and 16K. Most writes are 4K or less. The physical phases, on the other hand, are entirely composed of sequential read and write operations, and a mixture of 32K and 64K OP size. 

Most of the throughput shown in the graphs above comes from the sequential physical phases of workload, whereas the I/O comes from the small random and metadata intensive functional phases–both of which happen in parallel. 

In conclusion, pair Azure Compute with Azure NetApp files for EDA design to get bandwidth delivered at scale. After all, bandwidth drives business success.  

Learn More About Running EDA on ANF 

Read the eBook on HPC workloads, especially EDA, or get started running EDA on Azure NetApp Files today.

 

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