larryliu

Simulation models of electronic components, especially analog and mixed signal ICs, are scarce and more often encrypted and locked into the manufacturer's chosen proprietary simulation software(e.g. Tina-Ti and LTSpice)

There exist many good circuit simulators, including open source ones like ngspice, but every simulator lack many models to seriously simulate any real world circuit boards with ICs and discrete components from multiple suppliers.

As an electric engineer, would you love an open source repository of IC/component simulation (SPICE/IBIS) models?

Why do chip manufacturers lock up their models to their chosen proprietary simulator (which they usually provide for free anyway)

What are the difficulties of having this open source repository?

Is it simply difficulty or costly to develop third party models, or are they limited by copyright, patent etc?

Examples of serverless computing are Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions and Azure Serverless.

Scientific computing are conducted by researchers and engineers. A headache of scientific computing is each full scale iteration before the researcher can view the result takes long CPU hours, making testing and debugging only feasible in smaller surrogate scales.

Thus, more and more researchers are using serverless clouds to dynamically summon a high surge of computational power and release them when the full-scale iteration finish running.

For computation tasks without sensitive data or code, such as protein folding and public domain data crunching, there is BOINC and Gridcoin to facilitate distributed scientific computing and allow anyone to donate or sell computation power for Gridcoin, but BOINC's programming interface is not as easy to use as Amazon and Google's. In addition, BOINC requires manual approval of projects, because BOINC agent is not containerized/virtualized, computing code could present malware threat to host.

I wish to create an alternative to BOINC/Gridcoin, using container/VM images as computation tasks, and support unmonitored pay-as-you-go serverless computing.

I want to know if there is a large enough market for it.

Think this way, the world mines 6 bitcoins/day (US$42K/day, or US$15.3 million/year). Do all "embarrassingly parallel" scientific computing projects combined have comparable annual revenue with BTC or a lesser cryptocurrency such as ETH or DOGE?