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Cloud bursting Calibre OPC on Kubernetes

Hybrid cloud bursting Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) jobs with IBM OpenShift

Title slide for KubeCon 2022 presentation about running Calibre OPC jobs in hybrid burst mode on IBM OpenShift
How will you address your semi-manufacturing processing needs as data volume grows and time-to-market shrinks? Building more internal datacenter capacity isn’t always the best answer, but moving to a 100% cloud solution may also not be feasible. A cloud burst strategy allows for the same infrastructure on-premises as in public clouds, while using a managed Kubernetes service like IBM OpenShift to minimize configuration, setup and tear down. Controllers and operators make public cloud burst with OpenShift transparent to the engineering team, so they have exactly the capacity they need when they need it.

Calibre on Kubernetes

While most Calibre semi-manufacturing jobs still run on on-premises compute clusters using job schedulers to manage the queues, the industry is quickly moving to cloud solutions. Issues with fixed compute clusters include optimizing cluster utilization and facing project delays due to lack of compute resources at critical times. Many leading companies in the semiconductor ecosystem are starting the effort to adopt a cloud solution of some sort, whether it’s for burst or full-cloud.

Why would you consider cloud bursting for EDA workloads? Cloud bursting means an application runs on a private cloud or data center, and bursts into a public cloud when the demand for compute capacity spikes, or bursts. OPC workloads can be “bursty,” making it a challenge to provision enough cluster capacity on fixed server farms. Cloud bursting gives you the flexibility to deal with peaks in demand and frees up local resources for other uses.

At the KubeCon + CloudNative North America 2022, IBM Research and Siemens EDA talked about hybrid cloud bursting optical proximity correction (OPC) flows to public cloud managed Kubernetes services. They scaled Calibre nmOPC from 2,000 to 10,000 distributed processes.

Calibre semi-manufacturing jobs, like OPC, are well suited to launch on Kubernetes clusters, like IBM OpenShift. We developed the "Calibre Kubernetes Operator" and “Calibre Container” to enable this. The Calibre Kubernetes Operator has been successfully deployed on Rancher, IBM OpenShift, and EKS, and would certainly work on Azure AKS or any other.

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