Introducing the Sonnet High Performance Solver (HPS) engine

Shawn Carpenter, VP of Marketing and Sales

If you are using the new Sonnet Suites Release 12, you have probably noticed your EM solver runs are a lot faster—especially if you have a computer with a dual or quad-core processor.  Our new Sonnet Suites Release 12 analysis engines now use parallel processing on multi-core processors to give you exceptional speed to go along with Sonnet’s trademark accuracy.

In Release 12, we introduced two new solver engines: The Desktop Solver (DTS) engine, and the High Performance Solver (HPS) engine.

The Desktop Solver (DTS) engine is aimed at the typical desktop computer with a single multicore CPU.  Up to two computing threads can be used by the DTS engine, applying two of your CPU cores in parallel for solver calculations.  This change, together with meshing improvements, are providing our customers with 2x – 15x faster simulations than the solver engine in our previous release.

The High Performance Solver (HPS) engine is aimed at high-end computing server workstations.  The HPS solver engine will use as many processing cores in parallel as you have available on your workstation, up to 8.  An ideal workhorse workstation for the HPS engine would be a computer with two quad core processors.  (Hardware recommendations for best performance with an HPS engine can be found at http://www.sonnetsoftware.com/products/sonnet-suites/requirements-hardware.html).

The HPS Engine is a good choice for workgroups with high processing demands.  It can be combined with a Remote EM Processing server to service an entire design team with a dedicated high-end workstation.  With multiple high-end workstations and our emCluster product for computing clusters, you can harness the power of several HPS engines in parallel for incredible analysis time reductions for your workgroup.

Consider the following MMIC circuit analysis. 

The circuit shown in the figure is a full 4-stage GaAs MMIC design, with Co-Calibrated Ports left for later connection of transistor models.  An analysis grid of 2.5 x 2.5um is applied, and the problem requirements in Version 12 are about 3.1 GB of RAM for a frequency sweep from 30 to 50 GHz.  Analysis of this model is significantly faster using the Release 12 solvers over Release 11:

	Release 11 Solver (Baseline)	Release 12 Desktop Solver (DTS)	Release 12 High Performance Solver (HPS)
Analysis Time	870 min (14.5hrs)	153 min (2.55hrs)	61 min
Time Reduction Factor	1.0	5.7x faster	14.3x faster

 

With the incredible improvements in Release 12, an overnight analysis run has been compressed to just over an hour—for the entire frequency sweep.  Instead of waiting for an overnight run, you could turn 8 iterations of this design around in a day!

Which Solver Do I Have Today?

There are a couple of ways to check which solver type you have available.  One way is to check your Sonnet license file.  You should see one (or both) of the following feature names in the file:

1. emdesktop:  Desktop Solver engine license feature

2. emhighperformance:  High Performance Solver engine license feature

 

If you run a Version 12 EM analysis in Sonnet, you can gain a clue from the information in the upper left-hand corner of your EM Status Monitor. 

The EM Analysis Monitor reports the number of threads used and the total number of cores that are available on your workstation.  If the EM Analysis Monitor indicates that you are using more than 2 threads for your analysis, then it is likely that you are using an HPS engine license.  Remember, the HPS engine will not use more threads than the number of cores on your workstation, up to a maximum of 8 threads.  An HPS engine on a dual CPU quad core workstation will indicate the following to show 8 threads used on an available 8 cores:

If you have a workstation with a single quad-core CPU, then the High Performance Solver will use 4/4. Although the HPS engine can use up to 8 threads, it is limited to the number of available cores on this workstation (4).

If a Desktop Solver license is used on a workstation with a single quad core workstation, then you will see 2 threads/4 cores indicated.  The Desktop Solver engine is limited to 2 threads, even if you have more available cores.

Are you using the right computer hardware?

Remember, the new solvers will not use more threads than the number of cores available on your PC.  If the computer that you’re using is an older single-core Intel or AMD system, this might be a good time to upgrade your hardware to a new multi-core CPU system to realize immediate simulation time reductions in Sonnet.

High Performance Solver Evaluations

Would you like to give a High Performance Solver (HPS) engine a test, to see how much faster it could be?  Call or email your Sonnet Support or Sales team, or your local Sonnet representative.  Testing the HPS engine is as easy as loading a new license file. Contact us here