Inphi produces high-speed semiconductor components and optical subsystems that enable big data to move quickly throughout the globe, both inside data centers and between broadly distributed computing facilities. In today’s competitive semiconductor design and electronic design automation (EDA) industry, winning organizations leverage high-performance computing (HPC) and high-end design software to stay ahead of the game. As these tools are often expensive, maximizing utilization to ensure the design and development process runs quickly and efficiently — and that everything stays within budget — is the key to delivering innovative technologies to market faster than competitors. The team at Inphi understands the importance of HPC and EDA software performance optimization better than most. They evaluated several competing solutions before selecting Altair Accelerator, which stood out among the competition for superior performance and Altair’s reputation for excellent customer service.

Eric Morales, senior engineer at PING Golf, talks with Altair's Rick Watkins about innovating in equipment design using the Altair Unlimited appliance.

Open-source software celebrates principles such as open exchange, collaborative participation, transparency, and meritocracy. At their best, open-source projects are agile, well-supported, and responsive to changing user requirements. Customers benefit from high-quality, freely available software. Altair is a major supporter of open-source software and collaboration with efforts that include Altair Exchange, OpenPBS, and OpenRadioss.

But open source also carries risks. For active, well-supported projects, open-source software can be of high value, but not every project fits these categories. Open-source projects can also carry significant risks to the business including projects that may whither and die, excessive project forking, lack of documentation, and quality concerns. The trick is to balance the risks and rewards and make an informed decision about where best to deploy open-source software.

Subaru puts safety first by practicing human-oriented manufacturing, and the company's goal is to achieve zero fatal traffic accidents by 2030 – a goal they're using high-performance computing (HPC) to achieve. Subaru has long maintained its own HPC environment for simulation, but as computational processing requirements increased, they ran into a shortage of power and space for expansion. After initially exploring a private cloud, Subaru investigated public cloud options and selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with workload management by Altair PBS Professional. The move was a large-scale operation that was completed in around six weeks – a significantly shorter deployment time than the 3-4 months it would typically take to expand an on-premises HPC environment. In addition to performance optimizations like increasing per-node memory capacity, the Subaru team reduced the amount of data transfer required by setting up remote preprocessing.