Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1472851
JULY 2022 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 37 It's amazing how much faster some of these solvers are, but once they've got that, they'll just make the simulation bigger, so our cus- tomers will still run the Clarity solver for days. We've connected Clarity to the cloud through AWS, so now you have almost unlimited com- puting resources, but there's always a cost associated with it. While the solver can run much faster, maybe they don't want to use all the licenses required, so they might say, "I can get it done in 10 hours, I'm okay with that, even though I could use 10 times the licenses to get it done in one hour." Johnson: You do get to trade that off: how much resource you want to pay for vs. how fast you want to get your results. Is Clarity standalone up on the cloud now? Griffin: It's a hybrid. You do all your setup locally from your machine because that's inter- active. It's not really compute intensive; you're making decisions. en, when you hit the sim- ulate button, specify to simulate in the cloud. It just packages everything up, encrypted, and runs the simulation in a secure chamber where nobody has access to it. When complete, it then ships it all back to your machine. To you as the user, they don't really see a difference. I think that's the real power of what we've cre- ated with the cloud version of Clarity. Johnson: How is this going to change the engi- neers' way of doing their job? Griffin: Engineering is a game of "get me the best answer you can as fast as you can." What we've done largely before Clarity is we've seen many of our customers rely on what is called a hybrid solver. For some of these jobs I was talking about that are taking hours, the hybrid solver might take 10 or 15 minutes. You can get a basic idea of how things are going. Engineers will continue to use different tools at different times. e biggest breakthrough is that with all these compute resources now available— either on-premises or in the cloud—there's soware written to take advantage of that. e main thing that Clarity brings to the table is that the other tools on the market were written when people still used single-core machines. I think it's just so empowering for an engi- neer to have this capability when they want it. ey're still going to make the quick changes, quick decisions in-process. But at some point, they're going to run their simulation overnight. Johnson: I am hearing a series of iterations in the design process: quick checks while work- ing with small sections, transmission lines, etc. You want to make sure that everything is main- taining spec, piece by piece, and then move up to a module within your entire design. Even though you were in-spec at the transmission line level, it still behaves and within spec when put all together. Griffin: And no surprises when you get that prototype back; that's what you're aiming for. We're seeing the same thing in thermal because all these processors are so power intensive these days, especially as things get smaller. We're finding most thermal tools are bent toward the mechanical engineer. But really, the electrical power is what's causing thermal issues in the first place. If you can take all the detail of the power delivery network and make that part of your simulation, that's thanks to what we call a massively parallelized matrix solver, that we use in Clarity. We also use it We're finding most thermal tools are bent toward the mechanical engineer. But really, the electrical power is what's causing thermal issues in the first place.