In this article, we developed a massively parallel gate-level logical simulator to address the ever-increasing computing demand for VLSI verification. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first one to leverage the power of modern GPUs to successfully unleash the massive parallelism of a conservative discrete event-driven algorithm, CMB algorithm. A novel data-parallel strategy is proposed to manipulate the fine-grain message passing mechanism required by the CMB protocol. To support robust and complete simulation for real VLSI designs, we establish both a memory paging mechanism and an adaptive issuing strategy to efficiently utilize the GPU memory with a limited capacity. A set of GPU architecture-specific optimizations are performed to further enhance the overall simulation performance. On average, our simulator outperforms a CPU baseline event-driven simulator by a factor of 47.4X. This work proves that the CMB algorithm can be efficiently and effectively deployed on modern GPUs without the performance overhead that had hindered its successful applications on previous parallel architectures.

Logical simulation is the primary method to verify the correctness of IC designs. However, today's complex VLSI designs pose ever higher demand for the throughput of logic simulators. In this work, a parallel logic simulator was developed by leveraging the computing power of modern graphics processing units (GPUs). To expose more parallelism, we implemented a conservative parallel simulation approach, the CMB algorithm, on NVidia GPUs. The simulation processing is mapped to GPU hardware at the finest granularity. With carefully designed data structures and data flow organizations, our GPU based simulator could overcome many problems that hindered efficient implementations of the CMB algorithm on traditional parallel computers. In order to efficiently use the relatively limited capacity of GPU memory, a novel memory management mechanism was proposed to dynamically allocate and recycle GPU memory during simulation. We also introduced a CPU/GPU co-processing strategy for the best usage of computing resources. Experimental results showed that our GPU based simulator could outperform a CPU baseline event driven simulator by a factor of 29.2.

Recently general purpose computing on graphic processing units (GPUs) is rising as an exciting new trend in high-performance computing. Thus it is appealing to study the potential of GPU for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) applications. However, EDA generally involves irregular data structures such as sparse matrix and graph operations, which pose significant challenges for efficient GPU implementations. In this paper, we propose highperformance GPU implementations for two important irregular EDA computing patterns, Sparse-Matrix Vector Product (SMVP) and graph traversal. On a wide range of EDA problem instances, our SMVP implementations outperform all published work and achieve a speedup of one order of magnitude over the CPU baseline. Upon such a basis, both timing analysis and linear system solution can be considerably accelerated. We also introduce a SMVP based formulation for Breadth-First Search and observe considerable speedup on GPU implementations. Our results suggest that the power of GPU computing can be successfully unleashed through designing GPU-friendly algorithms and/or re-organizing computing structures of current algorithms.