Running Mentor Graphics at ITEE, UQ as Staff/Graduate Student

You cannot run Mentor Graphics software on the network without first customising your Unix environment.

Important!

Please browse through each of the following headings to perform the necessary setup applicable to your operating environment. You must follow the setup steps closely or Mentor Graphics will not operate correctly. The User Mapping section and the Running Mentor Graphics at various locations section are critical to the operation of Mentor Graphics software.

In addition to the setup as outlined below, you must run the script located in /home/scratch/mentor/profile_new.mgc for each terminal window you open for Mentor Graphics software. You can do this by either typing: source /home/scratch/mentor/profile_new.mgc on the xterm window. Follow the prompts on the screen to select the software package you need.

User mapping

Location map must be set up for Mentor Graphics to operate correctly. This setup applies to all operating system environments.

Log into the server with Mentor Graphics software installed. Run the script mentioned above.
Make a directory call 'mgc' under your home directory, ie.: mkdir $HOME/mgc;
Copy the location map files from '$CAD/user_settings/' directory to the new directory, ie.: cp $CAD/user_settings/* $HOME/mgc/.;

Running Mentor Graphics (Unix version) on PCs

SunRays terminals

Login with your given username and password.
If the SunRay terminal is not responding, you may need to reset the terminal to bring up the normal login windows - to do this, press ctrl-alt-backspace twice.
Login, start a new xterm window to run Mentor Graphics software.

PCs running Microsoft Windows with XWin32

You need to download this font file (ITEE users only) and expand this file to a directory on your PC.
Extract the file into a directory on your PC, for example, C:\Program Files\X-Win32_5.3\Lib\Fonts\mgc_fonts.
Start X-Util/XWin32-config and then choose "fonts" tab, click "ADD" and choose the default font directories AND the mentor fonts directory you've just created in order for X-Win32 to find all the fonts it needs.
Highlight the Mentor font directory and click "Make FONTS.DIR" button.
Start XWin32 on the PC, and login to the main server.
Start a new xterm window. Use SSH to log into mango: ssh -X mango.itee.uq.edu.au. Configure SSH to use a lesser encryption algorithm (such as blowfish) will speed up the connection, but is less secure. However, it will make no difference as you are within the School's network.
Then in the same xterm, you can run Mentor software.

Processor time limit

If you have anticipated that your session (or in fact any single process) will take a lot of CPU time, you need to run command 'ulimit -t x' before you start the process, where x is the number of seconds of CPU time you will need before the process will be killed. For example, if you need 3 hours of full CPU time, type in 'ulimit -t 5400' before running the process.

The servers have a default limit of 900 seconds of 100% CPU utilisation for any one process. So, for example, netscape can use the CPU fully for a maximum of 900 seconds before it will be killed irrespectively. It can run for 1800 seconds for 50% CPU utilisation, or 3600 seconds for 25%, 7200sec for 12.5% and so on. Most process are idle when not used, that's why processes "seems" to run for much longer than 900 seconds (15min) real time.

Software Location

Mentor Graphics software is installed on the student Unix server mango.itee.uq.edu.au.

Currently, the following products from Mentor Graphics are already installed:

ICFlow;
ADMS;
EN2002 PCB;
Design for Test; (select the desired package with the runmgc script)
ModelSim and Leonardo Spectrum; (setup automatically with the runmgc script - vsim, leonardo)
Seamless. (setup automatically with the runmgc script - cve)

If you have comments or suggestions, email me at velan@itee.uq.edu.au.

Prepared by Simon Leung

Modified by Balavelan

Last updated: 06/02/2008