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Parallel sparse matrix solution for direct circuit simulation on a multiple FPGA system

Parallel sparse matrix solution for direct circuit simulation on a multiple FPGA system
Parallel sparse matrix solution for direct circuit simulation on a multiple FPGA system
SPICE, from the University of California, at Berkeley, is the de facto world standard for circuit simulation. SPICE is used to model the behaviour of electronic circuits prior to manufacturing to decrease defects and hence reduce costs. However, accurate SPICE simulations of today's sub micron circuits can often take days or weeks on conventional processors. In a nutshell, a SPICE simulation is an iterative process that consists of two phases per iteration, namely, model evaluation followed by a matrix solution. The model evaluation phase has been found to be easily parallelisable unlike the subsequent phase, which involves the solution of highly sparse and asymmetric matrices. In this thesis, we present an FPGA implementation of a sparse matrix solver hardware, geared towards matrices that arise in SPICE circuit simulations. As such, we demonstrate how we extract parallelism at different granularities to accelerate the solution process. Our approach combines static pivoting with symbolic analysis to compute an accurate task flow-graph which efficiently exploits parallelism at multiple granularities and sustains high floating-point data rates. We also present a quantitative comparison between the performance of our hardware prototype and state-of-the-art software package running on a general purpose PC equipped with a 2.67 GHz six-core 12 thread Intel Core Xeon X5650 microprocessor and 6 GB memory. We report average speedups of 9.65x, 11.83x, 17.21x against UMFPACK, KLU, and Kundert Sparse matrix packages respectively. We also detail our approach to adapt our sparse LU hardware prototype from a single-FPGA architecture to a multi-FPGA system to achieve higher acceleration ratios up to 38x for certain circuit matrices.
Nechma, Tarek
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Nechma, Tarek
a0d5c618-5bc1-48a1-8716-f11f206ba3b3
Zwolinski, Mark
adfcb8e7-877f-4bd7-9b55-7553b6cb3ea0

Nechma, Tarek (2012) Parallel sparse matrix solution for direct circuit simulation on a multiple FPGA system. University of Southampton, Faculty of Physical and Applied Science, Doctoral Thesis, 179pp.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

SPICE, from the University of California, at Berkeley, is the de facto world standard for circuit simulation. SPICE is used to model the behaviour of electronic circuits prior to manufacturing to decrease defects and hence reduce costs. However, accurate SPICE simulations of today's sub micron circuits can often take days or weeks on conventional processors. In a nutshell, a SPICE simulation is an iterative process that consists of two phases per iteration, namely, model evaluation followed by a matrix solution. The model evaluation phase has been found to be easily parallelisable unlike the subsequent phase, which involves the solution of highly sparse and asymmetric matrices. In this thesis, we present an FPGA implementation of a sparse matrix solver hardware, geared towards matrices that arise in SPICE circuit simulations. As such, we demonstrate how we extract parallelism at different granularities to accelerate the solution process. Our approach combines static pivoting with symbolic analysis to compute an accurate task flow-graph which efficiently exploits parallelism at multiple granularities and sustains high floating-point data rates. We also present a quantitative comparison between the performance of our hardware prototype and state-of-the-art software package running on a general purpose PC equipped with a 2.67 GHz six-core 12 thread Intel Core Xeon X5650 microprocessor and 6 GB memory. We report average speedups of 9.65x, 11.83x, 17.21x against UMFPACK, KLU, and Kundert Sparse matrix packages respectively. We also detail our approach to adapt our sparse LU hardware prototype from a single-FPGA architecture to a multi-FPGA system to achieve higher acceleration ratios up to 38x for certain circuit matrices.

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Published date: December 2012
Organisations: University of Southampton, EEE

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 347886
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/347886
PURE UUID: 45483fbb-1252-4a96-b0d9-a50379dda5d2
ORCID for Mark Zwolinski: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-2230-625X

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 02 Jul 2013 15:17
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 02:39

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Contributors

Author: Tarek Nechma
Thesis advisor: Mark Zwolinski ORCID iD

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