Design technology and the cloud

Large-scale commodity computing coupled with services purchased over the internet (e.g. Software as a Service, SaaS), aka the cloud, are shifting the computing paradigm once again. Integrated circuit, package and board design is certainly being affected by this change and will, to some extent, migrate from workstations and corporate servers to the cloud. The effect of this change goes beyond the mere convenience of web-hosted design software and is profound. The main driving forces are cost-effectiveness and the exploitation of massive parallelism: The cloud gives the illusion of unlimited resources for a given amount of time, providing access to unprecedented capacity and speed on a pay-per-use basis. Over time a new generation of design technology, written from the ground up with parallelism and the cloud in mind, will emerge. This paper explores these issues in general, and examines a particularly good match for the cloud, namely electromagnetic field simulation..