Parallelizing spice in a timesharing environment

Abstract

SPICE was parallelized for use on the ELXSI System 6400 in a timeshared production environment. The first part of the paper discusses implementation issues in doing the conversion and reports elapsed and CPU times for parallel SPICE in one to eight CPUs in a standalone environment. The second part of the paper considers the implications of competition with other users in a timeshared environment. In particular, a load leveling mechanism was introduced into the parallel tasks to minimize total elapsed time in spite of unpredictable demands by other users on the system.