Title :
Potential performance of parallel conservative simulation of VLSI circuits and systems
Author :
Rawling, Mark ; Francis, Rhys ; Abramson, David
Author_Institution :
High Performance Comput. Project, Div. of Inf. Technol., CSIRO, Carlton, Vic., Australia
Abstract :
The deterministic nature of conservative simulation makes it possible to conduct an accurate trace-driven analysis of an existing sequential simulator in order to predict concurrency profiles and speedup bounds for several parallel implementations. This paper describes such an analysis carried out on a commercial VLSI digital circuit simulator with results based on real instance evaluation times at microsecond resolutions. The authors consider a central event queue based model with and without lookahead, as well as the distributed message passing model. The results help to answer the important questions, `Just how much concurrency is there in real commercial VLSI simulations?´ and `What type of machine would be best suited for a parallel implementation?´
Keywords :
VLSI; circuit analysis computing; discrete event simulation; message passing; parallel algorithms; queueing theory; VLSI digital circuit simulator; concurrency profiles; distributed message passing model; evaluation times; event queue based model; lookahead; parallel conservative simulation; parallel machine; performance; sequential simulator; speedup bounds; trace-driven analysis; Analytical models; Circuit simulation; Circuits and systems; Computational modeling; Concurrent computing; Discrete event simulation; Information technology; Kernel; Predictive models; Very large scale integration;
Conference_Titel :
Simulation Symposium, 1992. Proceedings., 25th Annual
Conference_Location :
Orlando, FL
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-2765-4
DOI :
10.1109/SIMSYM.1992.227575
