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Design Management software: RTDA FlowTracer/NetworkComputer vs. free comparison?

C

CharlieD

New member
I got an email from John Cooley (DeepChip) asking for information on Design Management software: RTDA FlowTracer/NetworkComputer vs. free comparison.

I’m posting it here because I would like to see a free flowing non-edited discussion on the topic versus the John Cooley edited version he will post in a month or two.

We use RTDA, switched from an in-house version using open-source code that did not scale as we added tools and engineers. It was also not a funded project so it was a very reactive environment which caused regular headaches. EDA vendors seemed to enjoy breaking it with their new releases.

I was not involved in the evaluation process (our IT guys did it) so I cannot comment on NetworkComputer but I can tell you that RTDA has a very good product with great support. We have access to the development cycle and get pretty much everything we ask for. Our builds are smooth and quick using FlowTracer.

I would be interested to hear other experiences with RTDA and different tools and methodologies so please post them here. Let’s do a deep dive and see if we can help vendors and users alike.

Thank you in advance, keep up the good work SemiWiki.

CharlieD

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This is an accurate description of use at AMD: SemiWiki - Going with the Flow at AMD

A little history: We started using RTDA at ATI maybe 10 or more years ago and AMD adopted it from there. These RTDA guys literally wrote the book on it. I seem to remember the install was a little rough but the support was great and the product was stable from the start. This was FlowTracer. I don't recall what we used prior probably nothing. I know a couple other companies in the Valley that use it too maybe they will chime in.
 
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Used FlowTracer/NC in previous company I worked for. Its main advantage is that it interacts with flexlm and sees both licenses status and workstations status. A job will not be submitted unless it has a free license. In addition it is a stable tool which is easy to configure to best meet needs. Local support (Israel) was also very good, and when needed got good support by RTDA.
eyall
 
We use RTDA tools (flowtracer, as well as license monitor which is a very nifty license information aggregation tool). Very happy with support- too bad the company doesn't market their tools better.
 
If I remember correctly we (at that time Silicon Access) started using flowtracer when it was just out in the market in 1998 or 1999. Brought major relief to the teams designing our 90nm chips. Any sensible design manager will require something like flowtracer in place to avoid the silly screw-up in some forgotten file update that tanks your chances on first-silicon success. Before flowtracer there was a lot of hacking with scripts (as flows were and probably still are today) which of course were a nightmare when it comes to verification. I agree with Krylov that it is somewhat surprising that the tool is not out there in much higher counts - probably because engineers (and yes, I am one too) like to maintain their "working" status quos, even if it is a dodgy one...
 
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RTDA FlowTracer/NetworkComputer vs free: CTO perspective

We appreciate the user feedback on NetworkComputer, FlowTracer and RTDA support. Your comments speak for themselves, and the same applies to the comments of the "EDA Expert" group at LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=111335006&gid=156877
Our view is that when it comes to cost, performance and scalability needed to support increases in design complexity and huge infrastructure for SoC design, freeware cannot compete with commercial tools.
RTDA tools are driven 17-year experience (SemiWiki - A Brief History of RTDA) in serving many customers that are pushing the envelope, driving our products on the bleeding edge and our support staff on their knees, 24/7.
· Some of our customers prefer RTDA tools over “leading” commercial tools due better visibility in EDA tool & compute resource utilization. They were able to uncover hidden inefficiencies and to improve organizational efficiency (SemiWiki - Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?)

· Others chose RTDA tools because they are more scalable for EDA & SoC applications compared to general purpose enterprise tools. This translates to faster aggregate cycle time and scaling to millions of jobs SemiWiki - RTDA at DAC: Scale to Millions of Jobs

· And regarding the 10X flow acceleration, let me clarify that we have seen anywhere from 1.3X to >10X speed-up that varies by customer application flow, Makefiles & Scripts, file system, available capacity (tool licenses & cores) and block partitioning methodology for large SoCs. This translates to faster time to market SemiWiki - Going with the Flow at AMD
But the above benefits and economic value cannot be measured without a live deployment, analytics and reporting. Unlike EDA points tools that can be compared on a benchmark, the value of enterprise tools is realized in a real time environment working closely with customers and constantly adding hooks and customizations to help them to optimize the use of our tools for their needs.
And our customers cannot get that 17-year experience and continuous support from freeware. We have been committed to customer success for a long time and we’ll continue to do so for the years to come.


Andrea Casotto, Founder & CTO of RTDA
 
Eric Peers • My company provides an agile framework for semiconductor including a build/test/regressions component, a continuous integration server, and coverage/test planning and data collection.

As you can well imagine, we send *lots* of jobs to internal grids. Our tools currently support RTDA, LSF, SGE/OpenGrid, and an internal solution.

RTDA's licensing cost is less expensive than LSF and they provide a licensing product that several of our customers use.

LSF is obviously the 500 lb gorilla, but I found Andrea Casotto's team to be most helpful and customer support there to be excellent.
 
Vikash Tyagi • We have been using NC for almost a year now, mostly for logic verification and analog simulation tools. We use fast-fairshare based preemption (using NC preemption methods for some tools and in-house developed preemption software for others).

We have seen increased license utilization and sharing since the release. NC is a lot cheaper than LSF and provides fast performance. We are using NC multi-queue to share licenses with remote sites, so far it's going pretty good.

Support team at Runtime is very helpful and quick in fixing issues.
 
Amit Gupta • I have been user of both of the modules of Flowtracer-NC and GUI based flow model. Three interfaces of NC-web based,CLI and GUI are unmatched compared to LSF. NC's job environment management support is also commendable. Last but not the least Andrea and his team respond to support request in no time. We used to get support almost immmediately no matter its Andrea's day or night. LSF cannot match RTDA processes. I believe LSF is there just because of legecy and brand.
 
Chris Wolff • I agree with the everyone's comments, especially the outstanding support from Alan and Andrea. Our test harness supports SGE, LSF, and RTDA NC so I could evaluate all of the options. SGE does not support Windows very well. LSF is the gold standard, but you pay for it (at least 3x more than NC). We've been using NC exclusively for a year now, and it's been a good fit. Some scripts were necessary to workaround features that I like from LSF that NC doesn't have, but the support people helped as needed. Regarding the original question about license support, we have some EDA tools with limited license counts and NC works great at limiting jobs and tracking license usage. I like the admin web site and resource handling better in NC than LSF too.
 
Another customer talks about RTDA:

SemiWiki - RTDA at Altera

I talked to Yaron Kretchmer of Altera to find out how they are using RTDA's products. I believe that Altera are the oldest customer of RTDA, dating back over 15 years, originally used by the operations team around the test floor before propagating out in the EDA and software worlds more recently.......
 
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