Forum Discussion

Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
12 years ago

Parallel compilation removed (again) from Quartus II v13.1 Web Edition

So it seems that parallel compilation, which was recently added back to Quartus II Web Edition, has been removed again from v13.1.

My question to Altera is, is there any sensible reason to force your users to waste more time when compiling projects to be used in devices that they purchase from you? If your idea is to convince people to purchase the full Quartus II, please think better. People who will do so will do it for other reasons. It is more likely that you succeed in annoying your customers, who are already paying you for the silicon. Microchip built their success by avoiding this kind of practices.

9 Replies

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    I have a large design..... what should I do??? I have wasted a lot of days and there is absolutely no parallel compilation, I am waiting for days, this is extremely extremely annoying.... have you resolved your problem? If yes, then please let me know how...Or are you using some other Quartus II version?

    Please let me know

    Waqar Hussain

    TUT, Finland
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    Do you see a big speed improvement when using parallel compiling? On my quadcore, I see that the CPU is most of the time at 25% usage, even with parallel compilation enabled (on 11.1 SP2). What is most surprising is that even for tasks that should be very easily multithreaded, such as synthesis, Quartus doesn't seem to use more than one core. I only see the CPU go up to 100% occasionally during fitting, end eve there only for a few seconds each time. To me it doesn't seem that Altera's implementation of multithreading is that optimal. Maybe it has improved since 11.1

    Fro a marketing point of view, the web edition is supposed to be used for smaller designs (it doesn't support the bigger Stratix FPGAs) so it could make sense not to have parallel compilation enabled. But I agree it's a rather low move ;)

    hussainw, what kind of design do you have that takes days to compile? Isn't there anything that you can optimize in there to reduce compile time? Which part takes most time?
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    I's make sure that the OS is actually running the CPU at their maximum speed.

    Some of them aren't very good at doing that for a single threaded workload because the process keeps being scheduled on different cpu and so the clock speed is never increased to its maximum.

    You might also gain from disabling hyper-threading.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    Hello Everyone,

    I have the same observation, I have 16 core linux based server, 64GB RAM, for the overall time required for compilation, CPU1 is used 100% and rest of the CPUs are used less than 1%. I don't understand why multi-threading is not happening. Anyway my design is very large, kind of an MPSoC.

    Best regards

    Waqar

    --- Quote Start ---

    Do you see a big speed improvement when using parallel compiling? On my quadcore, I see that the CPU is most of the time at 25% usage, even with parallel compilation enabled (on 11.1 SP2). What is most surprising is that even for tasks that should be very easily multithreaded, such as synthesis, Quartus doesn't seem to use more than one core. I only see the CPU go up to 100% occasionally during fitting, end eve there only for a few seconds each time. To me it doesn't seem that Altera's implementation of multithreading is that optimal. Maybe it has improved since 11.1

    Fro a marketing point of view, the web edition is supposed to be used for smaller designs (it doesn't support the bigger Stratix FPGAs) so it could make sense not to have parallel compilation enabled. But I agree it's a rather low move ;)

    hussainw, what kind of design do you have that takes days to compile? Isn't there anything that you can optimize in there to reduce compile time? Which part takes most time?

    --- Quote End ---

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    You can get an idea of what Quartus thinks it did on the "Flow Elapsed Time" report. I see 2.9 Average Processor Used by the Fitter process. And if you're watching your system through the process, you can see processor utilization for the 'fitter' executable peak at some multiple maybe %450 (average 4.5 CPU core used during given time interval). Analysis and Synthesis, Assembler, Netlist Writer are all single threaded (1.0 CPU used) and unfortunately in my case account for >%50 elapsed time.

    That said, hussainw, there is no way you are going to stress a 16-core machine by running a single instance of Quartus. If you want to speed things up, I think you need to look into design partitions and parallel builds or at least incremental compilation to avoid recompiling unchanged files.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    This report is interesting... On my latest project I have an average use of 2.2 core in the fitter and 1.7 in Timequest, all the others are at 1.0. And indeed Quartus is on one core more than 50% of the time. In my case it doesn't seem to be very useful to go over 4 cores, and even with a dualcore I shouldn't see a big difference. Going for higher frequency, more memory, and a SSD is the way to get a lower compile time, more than multiple cores.

  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    12 years ago

    --- Quote Start ---

    Going for higher frequency, more memory, and a SSD is the way to get a lower compile time, more than multiple cores.

    --- Quote End ---

    I just went through this last year, upgrading year 2007 machine to year 2012 machine. The conclusion I reached was that by far the biggest gain is realized through raw CPU and memory speed and that the disk was not a large factor. Short of overclocking and liquid cooling, I think the next noticeable time improvement will only come with investing the labor in incremental compilation and design partitions. "Rapid Recompile" has similarly been disappointing gains.
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    11 years ago

    --- Quote Start ---

    So it seems that parallel compilation, which was recently added back to Quartus II Web Edition, has been removed again from v13.1.

    My question to Altera is, is there any sensible reason to force your users to waste more time when compiling projects to be used in devices that they purchase from you? If your idea is to convince people to purchase the full Quartus II, please think better. People who will do so will do it for other reasons. It is more likely that you succeed in annoying your customers, who are already paying you for the silicon. Microchip built their success by avoiding this kind of practices.

    --- Quote End ---

    You are wrong, parallel compilation was not removed from the web edition. You need to enable TalkBack to make it available. See this link on how to enable it: http://www.altera.com/support/kdb/talkbackfaq.html
  • Altera_Forum's avatar
    Altera_Forum
    Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
    10 years ago

    Hi all,

    can you somebody answer me, if is compilation faster, when i use subsription edition of Quartus 13.1 than when i use Quartus 13.1 web edition ? (Web edition dont use more than one core, subsription use more cores than 1). In this answers

    https://www.altera.com/support/support-resources/knowledge-base/solutions/rd04022007_474.html

    or

    https://www.altera.com/support/support-resources/knowledge-base/solutions/rd03222007_376.html

    write that when Quartus use 2 cores it faster about 10% and when use 4 cores it is about 15%.

    Is it only this small improvement <

    Thank you for answer

    Honza Naceradsky