It's weird how the future can jump in your face and you don't recognize it for what it is. It happened to me about five years ago with Joe Costello, then the chief executive officer of Cadence Design Systems Inc. It was during the height of the EDA pricing model controversy. At the time, some very vocal EDA users were howling for Unix-based EDA tools to be moved to PCs. Since PC software was priced in the hundreds-of-dollars range, these noisy users mistakenly assumed that those $70,000 Unix-based EDA tools would, as a matter of course, suddenly have to drop to $700 to be sold on PCs. No such luck!
Instead, Joe Costello and a host of other non-Cadence EDA executives walked in to explain to the press, to users at conferences and to anyone who would listen all the gory, real-world economics behind making and selling EDA tools. It was during one of those EDA economics talks that Joe mentioned to me, in passing, how he thought that future EDA tools would run off of one Big Iron central compute server with PCs and lesser workstations tapping in as dumb terminals. Of course, I ignored his comment completely.
Now, five years later, I'm shamefully finding Joe's Nostradamus-like prediction to be laughingly more on track than I ever imagined.
In a recent ESNUG discussion about moving from using lots of individual workstations to a single compute server, Alain Raynaud from the Meta Systems division of Mentor Graphics noted: "We made the change, and I like it a lot. Before, when we needed to run a big job, it was a mess, both network and CPU-wise. Now we have one big iron. It's as if you had the whole system for yourself. Of course it has to be dimensioned very carefully, otherwise everybody will be slowed down. But you save a lot on network bandwidth (CAD jobs tend to rely heavily on I/O). You also never swap (with several GB of main memory), so your tasks finish earlier.
"Basically," he continued, "you have in one place very fast disks (RAID), the I/O that goes with it and a powerful CPU (think L2 cache). I would recommend no more than 30 engineers working on one such machine. But you don't need one CPU per user; that's where you save a bit."
Raynaud had two caveats: "any downtime and your whole department is on holiday. Another drawback is upgrading. It's easier to replace workstation after workstation, but changing your one big iron is not always so cost-effective. Try to negotiate a good upgrade deal."
— John Cooley runs the e-mail synopsys users group (ESNUG). E-mail jcooley@world.std.com or call (508) 429-4357.
