Note from Bob Smith, executive director of the ESD Alliance: This week, I turn over “Bridging the Frontier” to Derek Magill, engineering cloud architecture lead and global EDA license infrastructure lead at Qualcomm. Derek serves as chairman of CELUG and executive director of the Association of High Performance Computing Professionals.

Design Automation Conference (DAC) is only a few weeks away and excitement is building as plans finalize for the Design Infrastructure Alley, a section of the exhibit floor devoted to the infrastructure required to design chips and systems. Sixteen exhibitors and three days of insightful, thought-provoking content on engineering IT infrastructure topics make this a “must attend.” Just consider the cloud vendors populating the booths along the alley: Alibaba Cloud, Altair, Amazon Web Services, Cadence, Dell/EMC, FootPrintKU, Google, IBM, IC Manage, Metrics, Microsoft, Pure Storage Rescale, Six Nines, Suse and Univa. 

While DAC’s a great place to talk about new tools and methods to create more complex chips and systems, we rarely discuss the infrastructure needed to use these new methods and tools. Design Infrastructure Alley (Moscone West Level 1, booths 1237 thru 1255) bridges the gap between potential and execution and allows IT professionals, engineers and EDA suppliers to have a conversation about how best to enable design and verification. And, that brings us to the chock-full schedule of presentations at the Design-on-Cloud Pavilion theater with a host of panels and sessions on all things cloud. The complete program can be found at: https://bit.ly/2GkY2oo

Thirsty for more? Well, then join us as we continue the conversation at the Thirsty Bear Organic Brewery at 7pm for h’ors doevres, beer or wine, compliments of sponsors AWS, Cadence, Elastifile, the ESD Alliance and IC Manage. Thirsty Bear is two blocks down Howard from Moscone West to 661 Howard Street.
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