Enterprise emulation platform develops supercomputer

The K computer is the original 10-petaflop supercomputer that started full-scale operation in 2012. After a rigorous multi-vendor selection process, Fujitsu decided to use the Palladium Z1 enterprise emulation platform exclusively for its advanced server and supercomputer development.

With the Palladium Z1 platform’s high compile speeds of greater than 100 million gates per hour and its flexible job allocation, Fujitsu benefits from iterative design turnaround of less than a day for compile, allocation, execution and debug. With fast job execution above 1MHz for billion-gate designs, efficient hardware/software debug and virtualisation capabilities, Fujitsu is able to significantly enhance supercomputer development productivity.

“In order to build a high-performance, scalable supercomputer system, we needed a solution that could accommodate designs larger than one billion gates, and the Palladium Z1 enterprise emulation platform met all of our complex requirements,” said Akira Kabemoto, Corporate Executive Officer and Senior Executive Vice President, Head of Service Platform Business at Fujitsu Limited. “The platform is very easy to manage and scale which provides our engineering teams with added confidence that they can deliver high-quality, innovative designs to market within tight deadlines.”

“Designing today’s electronics, particularly those which are state-of-the-art, increasingly requires a more comprehensive verification approach,” said Dr. Anirudh Devgan, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Digital and Signoff Group and the System and Verification Group at Cadence. “The Cadence Palladium Z1 enterprise emulation platform allows Fujitsu to improve their system-on-silicon verification and hardware-software integration and optimisation, ensuring high reliability.” The Palladium Z1 platform, one of Cadence’s core verification engines, is what the company claims to be the industry's first data centre-class emulation system that provides enterprise-level reliability and scalability with lower total cost of ownership. The platform addresses the growing market requirement for emulation technology that can be efficiently utilised across global design teams to verify increasingly complex Systems on Chip (SoCs).