High-Performance Parallel Fault Simulation for Multi-Core Systems

Abstract

Fault simulation is a time-consuming process that requires customized methods and techniques to accelerate it. Multi-threading and Multi-core approaches are two promising techniques that can be exploited to accelerate the fault simulation process by using different parts of the hardware at the same time. However, an efficient parallelization is obtained only by the refinement of software with respect to the hardware platform. In this paper, a parallel multi-thread fault simulation technique is proposed to accelerate the simulation process on multi-core platforms. In this approach, the gate input values are independently assigned to each thread. Each input value carries the information of several parallel simulation processes. This provides a multithread parallel fault simulation environment. The experimental results show that the proposed technique can efficiently use the hardware platform. In a single-core platform, the proposed technique can reduce the time by 25% while in a dual-core increasing the thread approximately halves the execution time.