Parallel timing simulation on a distributed memory multiprocessor

Abstract

We present a parallel timing simulator, PARSWEC, that exploits speculative parallelism and runs on a distributed memory multiprocessor. It is based on an event-driven timing simulator called SWEC. Our approach uses optimistic scheduling to take advantage of the latency of digital signals. Using data from trace-driven analysis, we demonstrate that optimistic scheduling exploits more parallelism than conservative scheduling for circuits with feedback signal paths. We then describe the PARSWEC implementation and discuss several design trade-offs. Speedups over SWEC on large circuits are as high as 55 on a 64-node CM5 multiprocessor. These results indicate that the feasibility of using distributed memory multiprocessors for large-scale circuit simulation.