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In EDA environments, during chip design, the business-critical data related to that design is stored in various project partitions. One design project could be spread out over many partitions ranging from a 100 GBs to 100TB or more. These partitions that constitute a “whole” design may contain a mixture of lot of small files and some large files. In some cases, a design environment has a best practice of storing all necessary design tools along with the project data, and in other cases, tools are maintained separately and centrally. The point is, a full design spans one or more partitions, is large, and contains many billions of files.
While OneFS single namespace significantly reduces the need for many smaller partitions, some partitioning is necessary based on design methodologies adopted by each company. Overall, due to the wholesome nature of hosting designs across partitions, it makes sense to archive the design work by saving all the partitions as-is, so that few years down the road if a design needs a re-spin, the data layout (including any soft/hard links) is intact in archives, with the directory hierarchies preserved just the way it was originally. This provides most flexibility to the designers and shortest time to resume work on the design once it is restored. In contrast, when archive policies are designed around access time of files, it may end up archiving parts of a project, leaving behind some files in the original production partition.
Linux is prevalent in semiconductor environments, and the usage of autofs (automatic mounting of network filesystems) functionality integrated with the NFS export rules and authentication providers seems to be normal. With thousands of partitions for projects, scratch spaces, tools, home directories, it can be daunting for the IT admin to maintain a clean set of automounter maps.
With the above information around design archives and associated Linux environment challenges, following best practices for semiconductor archives can be considered.
The data under /archive should be available as read-only, while the top-level archive directory on the archive cluster is available as read-write export for administrative hosts.
Data classification is key to successful archive policies in the company. Giving the designers ability to see the aging of their data, being able to manage their own data classification, tagging their partitions, and letting them archive it on a routine basis are all good measures for an effective data life cycle management.