Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Accelerating innovation with high performance computing on AWS (MFG105)

Summary

• Ravi Poddar, Principal Semiconductor Industry Advisor at AWS, and Hank Kunan from NXP discuss High Performance Computing (HPC) and its applications, including semiconductor design.
• HPC is used in various fields such as drug discovery, genomic analysis, and is crucial for designing complex semiconductor chips.
• The cloud offers access to the latest computing and storage resources, helping overcome limitations of on-premises infrastructure and accelerating time to results.
• Amazon designs its own chips, such as the Graviton series and Inferentia, using AWS for advanced chip design.
• NXP, a global semiconductor company, utilizes AWS for their chip design and verification process, running multiple designs in parallel and managing large-scale simulations.
• NXP's cloud journey includes a focus on time to market, resource intensiveness, and cost optimization.
• They established a Cloud Center of Excellence to adopt cloud technologies sustainably while reducing risks.
• The center focuses on governance, finance, security, operations, development, and training.
• NXP adopted a cloud-smart strategy, emphasizing workload-driven decisions, and a committed relationship with one cloud provider.
• The Cloud Center of Excellence provides tools for cost management and security, with the cloud consumer being responsible for their application's costs and security.
• NXP's cloud migration strategy involved building a landing platform, promoting cloud adoption, and eventually closing data centers, which led to cost savings and application optimization.

Insights

• The semiconductor industry is increasingly relying on cloud computing to manage the growing complexity and computational demands of chip design and verification.
• AWS's infrastructure provides the scalability and flexibility needed for HPC applications, which is essential for companies like NXP that require significant computational resources.
• The cloud-smart strategy adopted by NXP highlights the importance of a balanced approach to cloud adoption, where business cases drive the decision to move to the cloud rather than a cloud-first mandate.
• NXP's Cloud Center of Excellence serves as a model for how organizations can manage the transition to cloud computing, emphasizing the need for governance, financial control, security, and continuous training.
• The shift from traditional IT to a more decentralized model where application owners are accountable for their costs and security represents a significant paradigm shift in enterprise IT culture.
• The success of NXP's cloud migration strategy, including the closure of data centers and the elimination of unnecessary applications, demonstrates the potential for cost savings and increased efficiency through cloud adoption.