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Abstract : |
Data parallel simulation involves simulating the behavior of a circuit over a number of test sequences simultaneously. Compared to other parallel simulation techniques, data parallel simulation requires less overhead for synchronization and communication, and it permits higher degrees of parallelism. We have implemented two data parallel versions of the switch-level simulator COSMOS. The first runs on conventional machines, exploiting the bit parallelism of machine-level logic operations. This version runs 20--30 times faster than sequential simulation on the same machine. The second runs on a a massivelyparallel SIMD machine, with each processor simulating the circuit behavior for a single test sequence. The simulator running on a 32,768 processor machine runs up to 33,000 times faster than sequential simulation on a workstation computer. 1, |
