Data Parallel Switch-Level Simulation

Data-parallel simulation involves simulating the behavior of a circuit over a number of test sequences simultaneously. Compared to other parallel simulation techniques, data-parallel simulation requires less overhead for synchronization and communication, and it permits higher degrees of parallelism. Two data-parallel versions of the switch-level simulator COSMOS have been implemented. The first runs on conventional machines, exploiting the bit parallelism of machine-level logic operations. This version runs 20-30 times faster than sequential simulation on the same machine. The second runs on a massively parallel SIMD machine, with each processor simulating the circuit behavior for a single test sequence. A simulator running on a 32768-processor machine runs up to 33000 times faster than a sequential simulator on a workstation computer