Hi,

I'm running a simulation using Cadence software. I'm using ADE L with AMS simulator. During simulation I get following notifications in CDS.log file:

\# Available memory:         25,735 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:23:30.124
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 26,215 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:23:30.124
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 26,842 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:24:20.126
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 27,424 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:25:20.129
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 27,986 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:26:40.135
\# Available memory:         28,260 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:29:10.151
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 28,740 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:29:10.151
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 27,848 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:34:50.113
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 28,524 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:36:20.118
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 29,189 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:37:10.121
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 30,035 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:37:30.122
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 30,921 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:40:00.136
\# Available memory:         30,917 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:41:20.143
\# Memory report: Maximum memory size now 31,595 MB at UTC 2015.11.09 21:41:30.144

and the farm computer where I run the simulation is restarted, thus I cannot finish my simulation.

I looked into Cadence Help, Google and searched Cadence manuals, but what I found is only a chapter titled "Tips for Reducing Memory Usage (memory)" in "Virtuoso Spectre Circuit Simulator Reference" (page 422 for document from 2014.10). There are four tips, from which only one:
"2. Try ulimit/unlimit command to adjust memory limitations."

might be useful for me. However, I'm not able to find how to use ulimit or unlimit commands.


My questions are:
1. Does "Available memory / Memory report: Maximum memory size now ..." refer to my RAM?
2. How to solve this problem?
3. How to use ulimit/unlimit commands?

I know this is a rather old thread, but it's not the simulator memory that is being reported here - it's the memory being used by Virtuoso. That's likely to be affected by large designs being netlisted, or plotting (or performing calculations) on large signals (lots of points) that have been saved by the simulator.

The messages are coming in the CDS.log file, not the spectre or irun log file, and so it's all about Virtuoso, not spectre (or AMS).

Regards,

Andrew

With ADE XL the netlisting is also done on the remote machine, but it was ADE L that was being used here. I can only imagine that the virtuoso session was sent to the farm (with bsub/qsub or whatever) and then a local simulation performed?

Either way, the memory consumption of virtuoso is what is being reported in the log - and that does seem rather high; maybe that is taking out the machine (even if it's the submitting machine). It would need understanding of why the virtuoso memory consumption is growing so much, which is likely to be one of the things I mentioned.

Regards,

Andrew.