research-article

Automatic Model Generation for Gate-Level Circuit PDES with Reverse Computation

Authors:

Elsa Gonsiorowski,

Justin M. Lapre,

Christopher D. CarothersAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS), Volume 27, Issue 2

Article No.: 12, Pages 1 - 23

https://doi.org/10.1145/3046685

Published: 27 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Gate-level circuit simulation is an important step in the design and validation of complex circuits. This step of the process relies on existing libraries for gate specifications. We start with a generic gate model for Rensselaer’s Optimistic Simulation System, a parallel discrete-event simulation framework. This generic model encompasses all functionality needed by optimistic simulation using reverse computation. We then describe a parser system that uses a standardized gate library to create a specific model for simulation. The generated model is composed of several functions, including those needed for an accurate model of timing behavior. To quantify the improvements that an automatically generated model can have over a hand written model, we compare two gate library models: an automatically generated lsi-10k library model and a previously investigated, handwritten, simplified gtech library model. We conclude that the automatically generated model is a more accurate model of actual hardware. In comparison to previous results, we find that the automatically generated model is able to achieve better optimistic simulation performance when measured against conservative simulation. To test the automatically generated model, we evaluate the performance of a simulation of a full-scale OpenSPARC T2 processor model. This model consists of nearly 6 million LPs. We achieve a peak performance of 1.63 million events per second during a conservative simulation. To understand the relatively weaker performance of optimistic simulation, we investigate hot spots of event activity and visually identify a workload imbalance.

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Cited By

Poshtkohi AGhaznavi-Ghoushchi MSaghafi K(2019)Optimistic Modeling and Simulation of Complex Hardware Platforms and Embedded Systems on Many-Core HPC ClustersIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2018.286001430:2(428-444)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2018.2860014
Poshtkohi AGhaznavi-Ghoushchi MSaghafi K(2019)PSMLThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-018-2682-175:5(2691-2724)Online publication date: 1-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-018-2682-1
(2017)Guest Editorial for the TOMACS Special Issue on the Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS)ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/308454327:2(1-3)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3084543

Index Terms

Automatic Model Generation for Gate-Level Circuit PDES with Reverse Computation
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Modeling and simulation
    1. Model development and analysis
      1. Modeling methodologies
    2. Simulation evaluation
  2. Parallel computing methodologies
2. Hardware
  1. Electronic design automation
    1. Timing analysis
      1. Electrical-level simulation

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cover image ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation

ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation Volume 27, Issue 2

Special Issue on PADS 2015

April 2017

203 pages

ISSN:1049-3301

EISSN:1558-1195

DOI:10.1145/3015562

Editor:
Adelinde M. Uhrmacher
University of Rostock, Germany

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 27 May 2017

Accepted: 01 January 2017

Revised: 01 November 2016

Received: 01 November 2015

Published in TOMACS Volume 27, Issue 2

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Cited By

Poshtkohi AGhaznavi-Ghoushchi MSaghafi K(2019)Optimistic Modeling and Simulation of Complex Hardware Platforms and Embedded Systems on Many-Core HPC ClustersIEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems10.1109/TPDS.2018.286001430:2(428-444)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TPDS.2018.2860014
Poshtkohi AGhaznavi-Ghoushchi MSaghafi K(2019)PSMLThe Journal of Supercomputing10.1007/s11227-018-2682-175:5(2691-2724)Online publication date: 1-May-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11227-018-2682-1
(2017)Guest Editorial for the TOMACS Special Issue on the Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS)ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation10.1145/308454327:2(1-3)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3084543

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