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This section introduces several different configurable settings that are applicable to chip-design workflows, based on the collective experience of PowerScale customers, field and engineering resources. One may wonder why PowerScale is not configured with the appropriate settings out of the box. PowerScale is a scale-out clustered NAS system that caters to a wide variety of workflows in many different industries. The operating and performance requirements for specific industries like semiconductor, media and entertainment, healthcare, and others are quite different, and in some cases are contradictory in nature. For example, while the media and entertainment industry tend to have serialized workloads focused on larger files, semiconductor computer-aided design workflows are metadata intensive, and have a mix of mostly small and large file sizes. The flexibility of OneFS allows it to be tuned for specific, predominant workflows, and together with the family of different node types available, a cluster can be configured to deliver optimized performance throughout the EDA workflow.
Some settings may represent a tradeoff, such as space efficiency over performance, or require adhering to business needs such as prioritizing data protection at the expense of some performance. One should first gain a good understanding of the tunable and weigh its effect on the workloads on the cluster before making changes. It is highly recommended to test the settings in an isolated environment and engage with account resources for recommendations and/or any questions.
Semiconductor chip design workflows have dependencies on the entire infrastructure including compute client (including CPU/memory/NIC), OS, EDA tools and libraries, job scheduler, mount options, networking speed and configuration, authentication providers (NIS, LDAP, AD), name services, and much more. When framing any test, it is best practice to take a holistic approach that accounts for these environment variables and nature of the workflows hosted on the cluster.
Dell recommends that a test environment be maintained that includes all client OS versions in use. Having the ability to test various EDA tool and libraries versions, and job scheduler in an isolated environment, can be helpful in debugging issues.
The OneFS configuration settings listed in the following subsections are recommended for general EDA environments.
Note: The settings presented have been divided into three levels: basic, advanced, and expert. The expert level settings should be performed only with the help of PowerScale support team personnel. The Dell systems engineer (SE) assigned to the account should be consulted first to ensure applicability and validation of the settings for the specific customer environment and workflows.