FlowTracer™ is a versatile and powerful workflow platform. FlowTracer™ allows its users to describe workflows in a simple, readable, and efficient format. The tool captures the workflow, identifying all inputs and outputs, and identifies dependencies between them. Dependencies can be files, other jobs, or of an artificial nature.  FlowTracer™ manages the workflow in its entirety, providing powerful visualization, debugging, and controlling capabilities. Drive workflows with the click of a mouse, or via the command-line interface.

Features

• Powerful GUI with dependency graph visualization capabilities and workflow controls.
• Describe flows in FlowTracer's™ flow description language (FDL), a format that is easily readable and maintainable, unlike Makefiles.
• Interfaces with job schedulers, such as our NetworkComputer™ and Platform Computing's LSF™.
• Automatically capitalizes upon parallelism opportunities.
• Ability to import Makefiles, allowing for the use of existing workflows. Discover problems with your Make-based workflow with FlowTracer's™ powerful visualization capabilities.
• Using our patented runtime propagation control (RPC), FlowTracer™ detects and updates your workflow status as tools execute. Unlike Make-based workflows, you do not have to describe 100% of the dependency information up front to achieve efficient and accurate workflows.

Performance

FlowTracer™ is the industry's first and only general purpose workflow management tool of this caliber. Whether you are working with lengthy EDA tool flows, massive software builds and test suites, or complex mathematical analysis flows, FlowTracer™ can get the job done in the most efficient manner possible. Our customers have reported up to 10x speedup in total workflow execution time over using Make.

The FlowTracer™ server stores workflows in memory. This allows for quick detection of dependency changes, obsoleting the requirement to run a command that crawls through countless directories and files to determine just to determine if something has changed. Changes are detected automatically and shown in the workflow visualizer as they occur. Failed jobs are stopped and can easily be re-executed without impacting valid jobs in the rest of the flow. This reduces workflow execution times and unnecessary utilization of hardware and software resources.

Unprecedented visibility and control of your workflow

The FlowTracer™ console provides a hierarchical view of the workflow, push-button control of the workflow execution, and powerful debug capabilities for problematic jobs. View job output with just a couple of mouse clicks to pinpoint failure reasons. View and traverse the dependency tree to see how the workflow is related. Perform an impact analysis, which provides an estimate of execution time for a proposed file change.

Sensitive project information can be organized and tracked in hierarchical sets, allowing for visualization and control of specific portions of your workflow. For example, separate your large ASIC design by functional sets -- synthesis, static timing analysis, simulation, and more. Control jobs individually, in sets, or globally. Search massive workflows for jobs and files, and view the status of connected computing resources and jobs that are waiting on resources.

FlowTracer™ also includes a web browser interface so you can monitor and control your workflow remotely, regardless of your current platform. Allow your manager or other team members to view your progress quickly and easily. See how many jobs and how much execution time is left in a running workflow, on-demand and in real-time. Delegate control of your workflow to a team member if you are unavailable. A full command line interface acts as the primary interface with the system. All of the power of the tool is available via self-documented commands. FlowTracer™ provides a powerful and flexible environment management mechanism to ensure that jobs are always executed in the proper environment. Using parameterized, named environments allows users to setup a tool to run in a workflow, or in an interactive shell, in seconds with a simple command. Also, named environments enable cross-platform job submission.

No third-party software is needed. FlowTracer™ includes all of these features out of the box, no additional installations are required.

FlowTracer™ in action

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