Re: [ng-spice] Support for SMP ??
On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Jon Bendtsen wrote:
> Hi, here at work, we are designing ASIC's. We have considered using
> ng-spice to simulate ...
> erhm, stuff, yeah lets call it that. (i dont know much about
> eletronics/ASIC/... i'm just the sysadm.)
>
> Anyway, we were wondering if ng-spice supports SMP, that being 2 or more
> processors
Ngspice, like spice does not support multiprocessing machines, nor shared
memory neither distributed. There is some code tha ngspice inherited from
cider that can do MP but it has never been tested and new devices models
will not work with this "features" enabled. SMP support for spice-like was
discussed on this list and, I think, is still an open issue in the EDA
world.
> And/Or if one could put the simulations on a beowulf cluster and get
> faster simulations out of that.
No, as far as I know, with the actual code.
> Finaly, there exists some nice pci cards with 1-4 G4 cpu's on them. The
> G4 has the altivec unit, which should be quite nice for doing matrix
> calculations, which i have heard from our designers that the simulations
> do ALOT of. So, my question was if ng-spice runs on powerpc/G4 and makes
> use of the altivec. (possible also if altivec might be a benefit for
> this kind of computation.)
I do not know altivec, but think that matrices that altivec computes are
the one used in computer graphics. Spice can have quite large matrices.
Anyway altivec, mmx, sse are simd extension and they can help, but most of
the code of the simulator should be rewritten.
Bye,
Paolo
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