Cloud Computing and SaaSHarry the ASIC guy, has organized a meeting at DVCon for discussing the inevitable way forward for application deployment and computing infrastructure — SaaS and Cloud computing.

The incumbent EDA overlords, being a conservative bunch with an arsenal of tools that haven’t been architected for such deployment, have been slow to catch on.  That is understandable, why would they want to change the way things are done and disrupt their entire business models?  They would need to completely change their core competencies, values, sales channels, and architectures if that’s even possible.

The EDA users, well … , it seems many are trying to figure out what the heck SaaS and Cloud Computing are. Here are my definitions for these terms:

SaaS — Software as a Service, whereby the user does not download or install any software.  Instead, the software is hosted by a service provider and available on-demand, as a subscription or pay-per-use over the Internet.  Some (like Cadence) consider the case where a VPN client is downloaded by the client and configured for accessing hosted software a SaaS too.  My definition of a “Pure SaaS” is that it must run only in a web-browser, as our SpectaReg.com register-map tool does.   Poster children for SaaS include:

  • SaleForce.com
  • Google Apps
  • TurboTax (QuickTax for Canadian readers)
  • Oracle
  • SAP

Cloud Computing — The concept of having massive common compute infrastructure, offered over the Internet, and shared and optimized between  many different users and services for many different purposes.  The Cloud host maintains the compute infrastructure and essentially leases compute resources (like CPU nodes, time, memory, bandwidth, and disk space) or specialized services based on some level of granularity.  The Could essentially abstracts all the hardware, services, and related back-end work.  Amazon has a big initial presence in this.

At PDTi we’ve been working towards building our SaaS for more than 4 years.  At first we didn’t call it a SaaS, we just knew that we were building a web-application.  When we first heard the term SaaS, we hated it and were reluctant to use it.  One of my business advisers put me onto the term WebWare which I think would have been much better.  Unfortunately WebWare didn’t catch on but SaaS did.

Anyhow, Harry has been following PDTi for a while now, and is very keen on SaaS, cloud computing and how these can be applied to EDA.  Harry invited me to present at the DVCon roundtable, and I am honored to accept.  Being a web-based company, though, remote to the Silicon Valley, we’ve decided not to attend DVCon or even have boths at most conferences… for us that is old school EDA and leads to a higher cost structure.  Using the web, wherever possible, instead of costly business travel, we can achieve a lower cost structure and can pass along the savings to our customers.  So if PDTi isn’t attending DVCon, how can I present?  We’ll I’m going to pre-record my presentation, send it Harry over the web and take questions as comments on this blog, as twitter messages, and via email.  I’ll post the recorded presentation online for all to see, after the event.  Wait, actually, we will have someone live at the event, one of my business advisors from the Valley, Michale Sanie, will be in attendance.

Here are the details of the Details of the SaaS & Cloud Computing EDA RoundTable:

When: 6:30 - 8:00 pm on Wed Feb 25th

Where: Monterey/Carmel rooms at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel

Presenters:

More details are available at Harry the ASIC guy’s blog.  Many thanks to Harry for or organizing this exciting event!

If you’re wondering how this relates at all to design verification, well SpectaReg.com does auto-generate SystemVerilog Register Abstraction OVM and VMM RAL SystemVerilog from the common register Specification.