Semiconductor companies typically run jobs by queuing them up, then using a job scheduler to dispatch them onto available cores in server farms while pulling EDA tool licenses from a license server. There are two primary goals facing organizations, and they’re somewhat at odds with each other: first, maximizing the utilization of server farms and software licenses and second, running jobs with minimal latency so users aren’t delayed.
The easiest way to satisfy the requirements of high utilization and low latency is to maximize the number of short-duration jobs. Just as it is easier to fill a bucket with sand than it is with large rocks, short jobs give the scheduler increased flexibility in what jobs to run and when. Short jobs will not block or occupy a resource for long periods and are therefore not likely to impede the progress of higher-priority jobs arriving in the queue.
Altair Accelerator™ is an agile, fully featured scheduler optimized for today’s EDA workloads. The most important difference between Accelerator and other popular schedulers is its event-driven architecture, which allows it to schedule a new job immediately when compute resources and software licenses become available.