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To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (1825)	2/12/2000 1:09:00 AM
From: Douglas Nordgren	Respond to of 4808

The Dilemma of FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) Design - Fat & Easy or Lean & Mean. [Fabric switching and FPGA & ASIC design articles are presented to shed background light on the R&D throes of fibre channel switch companies engaged in next generation fabric switch design.] eet.com FPGA synthesis tools lose battle with John Henry By Craig Matsumoto EE Times (02/11/00, 11:17 a.m. EST) MONTEREY, Calif. ? In American folklore, John Henry represents man's struggle against obsolescence. Legend has it that John Henry and his sledgehammer beat a steam-powered drill in a tunnel-digging contest, but his heart burst in the effort. An evening panel at FPGA 2000 entitled "The John Henry Syndrome" recast that legend in the FPGA world, asking whether software tools can ever outpace human intervention. The answer was a resounding "No." The joking barbs and good-natured heckling that characterized the panel started as early as the introduction by moderator Herman Schmit of Carnegie Mellon University. While all involved agreed that the tools have their shortcomings, debate arose over whether tools are good enough in a majority of cases, and whether the nature of required human intervention is changing. The main source of grief against software was summed up by Ray Andraka, president of Andraka Consulting Group, who noted that tools are best at synthesizing "fat, dumb, slow" logic. He and former consultant Stephan Wassan, now director of reconfigurable logic for MorphICs, produced examples where hand-crafted designs grossly outperformed synthesized designs. One extreme example from Andraka was a FIR filter where the synthesis tool placed gates into two opposite corners of a Xilinx Virtex FPGA. Andraka's hand-drawn version of the design, which naturally had all the circuits in one place, increased speed by more than 30 percent. As one of the designated defenders of software, Altera Corp. vice president Tim Southgate noted that tool-synthesized designs are fast enough for most projects. Designers are growing less interested in tweaking and more obsessed with time-to-market, Southgate said. "We see customers now that just press the button and get their design, and they're happy," he said. "Sure, you can beat us in speed, but most of the time, you don't need to." Willing tradeoff Wassan actually agreed, noting that "people are willing to pay [the price of] more fat in the design in exchange for time-to-market." Even agreeing that "John Henry" work will live on in FPGAs, audience and panel members wrestled to predict the future of that work. One attendee pointed out that the type of tweaking required is becoming higher-level all the time, pertaining more to algorithms than to actual gates. But Andraka argued that some knowledge of gate-level design will forever be required. "To do a good algorithmic design, you need to understand what the pieces of that algorithm are," he said. In addition, there was some contention that hand-tweaked designing is made possible by designers' ability to visualize a sensible layout. Some concern arose that the increasing complexity of designs and algorithms could eclipse that kind of talent. "In a few generations, I don't think you can comprehend what is a good layout," said Satnam Singh, senior staff engineer for Xilinx Inc. At that point, the reliance on tools is likely to be much greater, he said. Users are partly to blame if tools are lackluster, said professor Jason Cong of UCLA, noting that ASIC synthesis tools sell for six figures while FPGA software is practically (if not literally) given away. Some question arose as to whether that's the fault of overzealous marketing, but Southgate nailed the problem as one of perception. "Why can't we get money for tools? It's because we're viewed as selling chips," he said. Customers who already spend big money on silicon get testy when asked to shell out more for software, he said. But Wassan stressed that tools won't be improved unless vendors are willing to take input from experts. "I've gone to the vendors and tried to share the knowledge of what I know works," he said. Wassan and Andraka agreed that their suggestions get labeled as "the 5 percent designs from hell," and are rarely acted upon by vendors. One notable exception, for which Andraka commended Xilinx, was that company's decision to add a floor planner to its software for the Virtex FPGA, a part that initially was marketed as having enough routing to make manual placement unnecessary.

To: Douglas Nordgren who wrote (1825)	2/12/2000 9:20:00 AM
From: J Fieb	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4808

Thanks for the background reading material. Will be interesting to see the various companies develop their Iband offerings.....I likes this excerpt best..... When the switch fabric is doubled, it requires four times as many chips. And if they make the fabric 8 times bigger? We need some Dense FC components? Good for director class? Get the Skinny on Rackmount Servers -- Rackmount server makers are remodeling their lines, keeping service providers in mind Jan Stafford Forget The Zone diet plan or Jenny Craig's new spokeswoman. The real slenderizing revolution is taking place in the e-business data center. Today, Internet and application service providers want their servers slim, stacked, cheap and easy. The parallels with current events abound, as these demands from the leaders of the Internet world have brought a bit player into a starring role. Nowadays, the unglamorous rackmount server is in "the zone" as the center of attention. "Major vendors are focusing more attention on rackmount servers," says Ed Wagner, an analyst for Dataquest Inc., San Jose. In the past, many vendors had only a few rackmount models in their lines and did not promote them heavily. "That's changed dramatically," Wagner says. "Right now, racks are the way to go for the service provider (SP) market." Compaq Computer Corp. is the latest vendor to remodel its lines with SPs in mind, following the course laid last year by Sun Microsystems Inc. with the Netra t1 and IBM Corp. with its RS/6000 B50. Unveiled Jan. 31, the new ProLiant DL servers put heavy-metal computing power and light-rock manageability into small, rackmountable boxes. "The Internet data center is expanding the boundaries beyond the functions that have traditionally been in the server," says Paul Gottsegen, director of Compaq's North American Industry Standard Server Division. "SPs have an overall need for radical simplification, so we redesigned our server lines to simplify product choice and usage." Coming this spring will be Hewlett-Packard Co.'s radically redesigned entry-level server line for SPs. "We're taking a long, hard look at what the Internet data center needs to be," says Les Wilson, HP worldwide mission-critical solutions manager for enterprise and Web infrastructure. "Those needs are obviously very different from enterprise data centers of a few years ago." In a way, the server vendors have created a monster. The availability of high-performance, relatively low-cost servers enabled the whole Internet market explosion. "Without reliable servers, the Internet would still be in the hands of corporations and organizations with mainframes," Wagner says. Because server vendors enabled the mainstreaming of the Internet, they now have to feed the monster with servers tailored to its needs. "SPs need to be able to add new services fast while providing high levels of network availability," says David Lawler, Sun Microsystems' Netra t1 product line manager. "They need to keep costs under control by making the most of existing facilities, equipment and staff." That means servers designed for SPs must be small, reliable, easy to use, and easy to expand and scale. They Need Their Space A top priority for Internet data centers is conserving space. "A lot of ISPs are the typical garage-space start-ups," says Lou Boffa, marketing manager, IBM peripheral products and ISP practices for KeyLink Systems, a distributor in Cleveland. "Even heavily funded SPs find that data center space is at a premium." Servers can be as slender as 1.75 inches high. Introduced last June, Sun's Netra t1 server is one unit (1.75 inches) high. Forty can be stacked in a single 19-inch rack. With Compaq's new ProLiant DL380 3U (5.25-inch) server, 14 servers can be stacked in a standard Compaq 42U rack. As many as 20 IBM RS/6000 B50 3U servers, 60 discrete network connections and more than 720 GB of internal storage can be placed in a 19-inch rack. Usually, calling something "dense" is an insult. In rackmount servers, however, being dense is "a good thing," as Martha Stewart would say. Thus, the "D" in Compaq's new DL line stands for dense. "Whereas performance was measured in TPCC benchmarks, now it's measured in performance density," says HP's Wilson. The raw performance of Compaq's rackmounted DL servers is identical to sister products in the freestanding or tower form factor, says Gottsegen. New performance enhancements added to the Compaq DL380 are a 733-MHz, Intel Pentium III processor, 133-MHz GTL bus, RCC 3.0 LE chipset and high-performance 133-MHz SDRAM. Radical simplification and economics also determine the SP's fondness for single- or dual-processor servers. "SPs are buying a lot of inexpensive two-bys, the sweet spot in the server market today, rather than splurging on eight-bys," says Wagner. "Having one single processor server for every discrete application implifies management," says Gottsegen. Whereas vertical scalability has been the focus in server functionality in the past, Internet data centers want small form factor, low-priced servers that have horizontal scalability, which allows SPs to increase throughput by running the same service on several systems at the same time. Of course, some applications-such as database processing or complex mail serving-don't benefit from horizontal scaling. "These do well with vertical scalability offered by symmetrical multiprocessing systems, such as the Sun Enterprise 6500 server," says Lawler. Radical simplification has driven home the "keep it simple, stupid" maxim in designing servers that are easy to deploy, manage and expand. In Internet data centers, manpower is as crunched as space is. "Service providers want stuff built in: built-in Fast Ethernet connectors, built-in remote manageability, built-in remote power on/power off, automatic server restart, and on and on," says Lawler. "Reducing operator intervention is a must." Easy And Serviceable Ease-of-management features are present in most SP servers today. "This enables systems integrators for Web servers to get the same interface they'd get from the monitor attached to the server itself," says Gottsegen. Even making servers easy to put into racks is important. Sun's Netra t1 chassis has cable hooks on the back so SPs don't have to tie down servers by hooking ties on fan holes, for example. Serviceability features on new rack-mount servers include front-accessible, hot-pluggable SCSI disk drives that allow easy service and maintenance without interrupting system operation. "The biggest downtime cause is people," says Wagner. "The design of the box has to make it easy to administer for people who are, frankly, not as well-trained as IT managers once were." Those same people have to be able to expand systems quickly. "Easy-to-access expansion slots are a must," says KeyLink's Boffa. Lower cost and simpler operating systems have helped Intel-based servers "make great gains" over Unix-based ones, Wagner says. The Linux flavor of Unix OS could save the day for Unix. Rackmounted, single-purpose appliance servers are the next frontier. Compaq and Maxtor Corp., among others, plan to make announcements soon.