Applied Materials Journey To Host CAD Designs On Cloud

Summary:

How Applied Materials enabled users to access CAD applications from the cloud.

Highlights:

The desktop CAD applications, running on centralized CAD blade farms, are delivering performance improvements of over 30 percent compared to traditional CAD workstationsThe electricity consumption of a regular laptop and CAD blade is at least 40 percent lower than a standard CAD workstation

Reader ROI:

How CAD users can now experience the luxury of doing their jobs on regular desktops

Moore’s law predicted that chip capability would double every two years. Applied Materials has proven that rule for decades, boasts Applied Materials on its website.

But keeping up with that pace of development is hard work. It has required a slew of acquisitions over the last five years—and 24×7 R&D work across three continents.

It’s also required centralizing the company’s 17 IT groups into one—and giving its CAD users something no other design could: On the fly access to design data using desktop virtualization and the cloud.(For more tips to deploy private clouds turn to page 114)

Chip on the Shoulder

As semiconductor manufacturers started stacking chips horizontally and vertically, the prime hitch lay in filling tiny gaps between transistors to electrically isolate them from each other.  Applied Materials engineered a novel insulator deposition tool to fill these gaps measuring a few nanometers. Not surprisingly, MIT’s Technology Review named Applied Materials one of the 50 most innovative companies in the world in 2011.

That’s what Applied Materials means when it says, “Building tomorrow’s transistor, atom By atom.” Designing such chips involves designing big assemblies with over 30,000 parts—all done at a scale below 20 nanometers. It requires heavy CAD applications that demand large amounts of rendering, which traditionally needed to be done on CAD workstations equipped with dedicated, extremely high-end graphics processing units.

“Our work is really complex from a design perspective as we devise high-end capital equipment used in the semiconductor industry,” says Nagaraj Bhat, director of global information services, which supports half of the over 2,000 R&D engineers who work simultaneously to develop products involving complex designs—around the clock.

For an international company like Applied Materials, this meant big-ticket hardware projects and implementing point solutions across three sites in three continents: Austin, Amsterdam and Bangalore. When an engineer at Applied’s Austin office signs out at six, work on his design continues in Bangalore. Each file is anywhere between 2GB to 8GB, says Bhat.

Simultaneously, Applied Materials has undertaken a large number of acquisitions, the last of which was Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates in May 2011. The strategy forced the company to deal with multiple IT infrastructures—and worse, work with several project lifecycle management (PLM) instances worldwide on a day-to-day basis, which typically have data integrity issues in a multi-site environment.

“Changes made by a design team at Amsterdam would be lost before someone accessed an Adobe InDesign file,” says Bhat.

What Applied needed, in Bhat’s opinion, was a standardized PLM platform. It would establish a process-driven workflow, connecting all stakeholders working on a project and uniting multiple subsidiaries. The process would also lower administration costs and complexity associated with keeping software, hardware and servers up-to-date.

“We started to lay down our architecture roadmap with our journey towards a single PLM platform,” recalls Bhat. But, his team soon realized that they had just struck the tip of an iceberg. “We figured the extent of the problem as we tried to move more users into this newly-conceived project.”

Packing Up for the Cloud

Bhat discovered that the consolidation was going to be costly. They had to integrate multiple CAD apps that the engineers used with the single unified PLM platform. “We had to start with business units in different geographies and many of them were coming through the M&A process,” says Bhat. Creating multiple PLM instances across the globe was only going to complicate their problems of data integrity, and the inability to support and manage five sites simultaneously.

“All our requirements pointed to a high-density centralized datacenter,” says Bhat. The move was significant. If it went through with the project, Applied Materials would be the first company in India to have its entire CAD infrastructure on a cloud.

“We couldn’t see any point in having data tied down to desktops. By being on the private cloud, data would follow users everywhere and they would only need to visualize it,” says Bhat.

We couldn’t see any point in having data tied down to desktops. By being on the private cloud, data would follow users everywhere and they would only need to visualize it.

Applied Materials leveraged “central grade infrastructure” that would allow users to do CAD computing in the datacenter rather than at a CAD workstation. The project involved installing desktop blades in the server farms with a graphics processing unit, which would replace heavy workstations at an engineer’s desk. In addition, they employed high-speed networking to eliminate networking drags giving CAD professionals real-time access to 3D designs.

 The consolidation helped Bhat bring all existing PLM platforms together.  “Virtualization techniques available in the market don’t provide solutions to handle virtualization with high graphic content,” says Bhat. “Really, there is no solution that allows sharing the graphics processing unit and delivers graphic intensive application over the wire!”

Combining the blades with CAD apps running adjacent to the PLM servers gets rid of the need to host local instances of PLM environment in each country. “We were now able to have our design engineers located in different parts of Asia use regular office desktops to connect to the centralized CAD blades farm,” says Bhat.

In addition, synchronization errors in multi-site instances that caused data integrity issues were removed, enabling cost savings. “Our ability to centralize our CAD blades farm helped us to avoid making investments in creating multiple instances of the PLM platform across geographies which otherwise would cost high capital and operating expenses,” says Bhat.

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

The company’s journey to the cloud began two years ago, says Bhat. Pilots were set up in Austin and Bangalore for 100 CAD blade servers each, long before conceiving the need for a datacenter set up.

 “We started this process to support our non-India user base including the Asia Pacific.  We then realized that in order to expand the footprint of 100-200 users and support 2,000 users, we needed to create a platform which is easy to manage,” says Bhat.

But being a trailblazer had it’s problems. “We faced a dearth of solutions that would help interface the user with the datacenter.” But HP’s ‘Remote Graphic Solution’ came to the team’s rescue. “It provides a thin-client type of an interface to the end-user that installs itself on the desktop,” says Bhat.

The launch of the cloud service made for safe and secure storing of designs possible for CAD engineers. The redundant environment also enables users to track changes made to the design, hence, avoiding delays.

Seeking Buy-In

The road to success is dotted with some conflict. For Bhat the proposal to invest $5.5 million (about Rs 24 crore) in the project raised eyebrows. But Bhat was prepared. “We had to go to each of the GMs for buy-in. Naturally, it took a good deal of explanation from an ROI perspective,” he recalls.

The capital committee heard out Bhat’s proposal, which clearly stated savings expected in the long run. “I always remember to insert cost clarity in every proposal I deal with. More importantly, we told management that the project would deliver a capability which can’t be measured in dollars but through productivity improvement,” says Bhat. He was certain the project would deliver ROI both from the cost saving and cost avoidance perspective.

Testing It Out

The many practical and technical tests to put CAD on the cloud are familiar. But the main challenge is getting users to adopt it. And for that companies need to give their users a very good reason to move. “The most critical reason is time,” says Bhat. “You know, time is money.”

Another challenge was datecenter design. “We can have 54 blade servers in a single rack but that would require an enormous amount of power,” says Bhat. The challenge that confronted Bhat’s team was to muster up the capacity to host 400 CAD blades. Hosting them in a traditional datacenter would burn out the system which was geared to generate only 3-5 KW per rack. “We designed a high-density datacenter capable of supporting 20KW per rack. We now host 64 CAD blades per rack compared to the previous datacenter which has 16-32 blades per rack,” says Bhat.

 Heat dissipation was another challenge. In traditional datacenters, you have a buffer of 10-15 minutes to react to an increase in heat. But in a high-density datacenter temperatures can go from 18°C to 64°C in 30 seconds.

Having an office at the International Tech Park in Bangalore limited infrastructure design in terms of cooling, says Bhat. Relying on the available chilled water supply wasn’t foolproof. Hence, provisions for gas-based cooling to provide redundancy in case the water supply was cut off became a requirement, says Bhat.

We couldn’t see any point in having data tied down to desktops. By being on the private cloud, data would follow users everywhere and they would only need to visualize it.

The Benefits

Wherever you go, your data follows. “CAD users can now experience the luxury of doing their jobs on regular desktops sitting in the comforts of their homes,” says Bhat. How many CAD users can say that?

 At Applied Materials, engineers across the world are now able to use standard desktops or laptops to connect to a CAD blade which is housed in the datacenter—irrespective of their location (both Internet and WAN connectivity are used). Applied’s design engineers spread across the Asia-Pacific region including Taiwan, Korea, Japan, China and India can avail of the cloud service.

Bhat has seen a huge difference in its CAD user feedback today compared to a year ago. “They’re far happier now as they don’t have to contact IT support to resolve data integrity issues,” he says. It has, hence, not just reduced support costs but also helped them perform faster. “It’s like working on a supercomputer through one’s laptop. Who wouldn’t want that?”

The desktop virtualization consolidated Applied’s hardware and software environment and drastically reduced support cost. “We forget that outsourcing of R&D work to India is not just about the cost—it’s also about time to market,” says Bhat.

The capital investment with CAD blades and associated datacenter infrastructure is significantly higher than that of provisioning a standard CAD desktop. However, productivity improvement, lower operating costs, reduced IT support costs combined with productivity improvement and avoiding investment of multi-site environment are factors that can’t be ignored.

“The electricity consumption of a regular laptop and CAD blade is at least 40 percent lower than a standard CAD workstation,” says Bhat. Applied’s new datacenter, which was set up with the latest green technologies also enabled the company to achieve a PUE (power usage effectiveness) of 1.6—about 25 percent better than its old datacenter.

The project showed the company’s engineers that there was no longer a need to load each individual CAD file, analyze, and then search parameters that match search criteria. The impact on computationally expensive recognition feature saved time remarkably. Naturally, Applied’s engineers have welcomed the change with open arms. “We see that over six percent of our CAD users have been regularly accessing the CAD environment through remote access from their home or when they are on the move contributing to increased productivity and work-life balance,” says Bhat.

 The desktop CAD applications, running on centralized CAD blade farms, are delivering performance improvements of over 30 percent compared to traditional CAD workstations. This has been possible due to the sheer increase in the computing power introduced by the CAD blades. “We have seen significant performance gain of up to 60 percent in some cases,” says Bhat.

 Bhat bases his ROI on a number of factors; one of them is on the money that will be saved in the future. “I understand if many CIOs don’t see an ROI from this project because of the investment. Delivering a return on investment with only material value in mind is definitely challenging.” But he believes that ignoring how technology can impact a business and not quantifying its soft benefits is acute short-sightedness.