Re: [ng-spice] Support for SMP ??


To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
From "James Swonger" <jwsrh@hotmail.com>
Date Tue, 30 Jan 2001 15:48:20
Delivered-To mailing list ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it
Mailing-List contact ng-spice-help@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it; run by ezmlm
Reply-To ng-spice@ieee.ing.uniroma1.it

If you're doing looped analyses (like parametric or Monte Carlo analyses) 
then parallelism at the "job" level will help you out and this could be 
script-automated or -assisted. If you're looking to speed up individual, 
linear runs, then I think that you're probably out of luck and only faster 
hardware / more memory will help. The analog simulations are inherently 
serial solutions of large matrices and I'm not optimistic that you can get 
the matrix solution to be shared. Even if you could, you would need a lot of 
brain-to-brain bandwidth; throwing the whole matrix back & forth over a 
network would be even nastier.

Check into what types of SPICE jobs the big waits are incurred for;
are they, say, nested temperature/process/parameter loops, that you could 
flatten and parcel out to individual nodes in a compute cluster, and then 
reassemble the output data? Or just hugely long single runs?

>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
>And/Or if one could put the simulations on a beowulf cluster and get
>faster simulations out of that.

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