Adaptive fault simulation on many-core microprocessor systems

Efficiency of Network-on-Chip based many-core microprocessors to implement parallel fault simulation methods for different circuit sizes is explored in this paper. We show that a naive and straightforward execution of fault simulation programs on such systems does not provide the maximum speedup due to severe bottlenecks in off-chip shared memory access at memory controllers. In order to exploit the available massive parallelism of homogenous many-core microprocessors, a runtime approach capable of adaptively balancing the load during the fault simulation process is proposed. We demonstrate the proposed adaptive fault simulation approach on a many-core platform, Intels Single-chip Cloud Computer showing up to 45X speedup compared to a serial fault simulation approach.

[1]  Zeljko Zilic,et al.  Efficient Data Encoding for Improving Fault Simulation Performance on GPUs , 2013, 2013 International Symposium on Electronic System Design.

[2]  David Bryan,et al.  Combinational profiles of sequential benchmark circuits , 1989, IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems,.

[3]  Sriram R. Vangal,et al.  A 2 Tb/s 6$\,\times\,$ 4 Mesh Network for a Single-Chip Cloud Computer With DVFS in 45 nm CMOS , 2011, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[4]  Franco Fummi,et al.  FAST-GP: An RTL functional verification framework based on fault simulation on GP-GPUs , 2012, 2012 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE).

[5]  Dong Sam Ha,et al.  HOPE: an efficient parallel fault simulator for synchronous sequential circuits , 1992, DAC '92.

[6]  Hans-Joachim Wunderlich,et al.  Efficient fault simulation on many-core processors , 2010, Design Automation Conference.

[7]  Daniel G. Saab,et al.  VLSI logic and fault simulation on general-purpose parallel computers , 1993, IEEE Trans. Comput. Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst..

[8]  David R. Kaeli,et al.  HQL: A Scalable Synchronization Mechanism for GPUs , 2013, 2013 IEEE 27th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing.

[9]  Vijay Pitchumani,et al.  Fault simulation on massively parallel SIMD machines algorithms, implementations and results , 1992, J. Electron. Test..

[10]  Zainalabedin Navabi,et al.  Hierarchical fault simulation using behavioral and gate level hardware models , 2002, Proceedings of the 11th Asian Test Symposium, 2002. (ATS '02)..

[11]  Architectures Book,et al.  Digital System Test And Testable Design Using Hdl Models And Architectures , 2016 .

[12]  Sunil P. Khatri,et al.  Towards acceleration of fault simulation using Graphics Processing Units , 2008, 2008 45th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference.