Apex Regression Conductor (ARC)
Maximize your resource utilization with the Apex Regression Conductor (ARC).
The Apex Regression Conductor (ARC) is a bandwidth-based continuous regression testing platform designed to efficiently manage resource-intensive VLSI design projects. It ensures your compute farm is always busy by auto-triaging failed jobs and auto-allocating resources in accordance with simulation bandwidth, availability of scarce resources, and organizational priorities.
Bandwidth-Based Continuous Testing Platform
- Traditional completion monitoring and pass/fail reporting
- Continuous submission of jobs as resources become available
- Ensures a constant, low-priority demand for resources, while avoiding unrecoverable over-saturation
- Immediately expose new RTL bugs
- Run more frequent coverage analysis
- Run more implementation experiments: Different constraints, different libraries, different EDA tool versions
ARC ensures your EDA compute farm is always busy.
ARC Architecture
- Simple configuration using YAML text files
- Working state and records stored in ARC database
- ARC iterator dispatches job suites via dispatcher, based on reported bandwidth available in compute farm
- Automatic workspace checkout, update, and cleanup in working storage
AJM’s database is customer-extensible — limited only by available storage and your imagination.
ARC Control Features
- Job suite weighting: Job suites with higher weights dispatch more often
- State management and order control: Manually rearrange dispatch order of job suites as desired using next pointer and shuffle operations
- Force operations: Force immediate dispatch of high-priority regressions
- Dynamic deferral: Allow a job suite to defer execution when needed
- Triage operations: Automatically re-run a limited number of failing jobs
- Notifications: Sophisticated notification system notifies job suite owners when suites dispatch, finish, and are affected by ordering operations
ARC administrative users have complete control over its wide array of features.