Towards Optimization Techniques for Dynamic Load Balancing of Parallel Gate Level Simulation

摘要: As a consequence of Moore's law, the size of integrated circuits has grown extensively, resulting in simulation becoming the major bottleneck in the circuit design process. Consequently, parallel simulation has emerged as an approach which can be both fast and cost effective. In this thesis, we examine the performance of a parallel Verilog simulator, VXTW, on four large, real designs using an optimistic synchronization scheme named Time Warp. As previous work has made use of either relatively small benchmarks or synthetic circuits, the use of these circuits is far more realistic. Because of the low computational granularity of a gate level simulation and because the computational and communication loads vary throughout the course of the simulation, the performance of Time Warp can be severely degraded or can even be unstable. Dynamic load balancing algorithms for balancing the computational and …