[Iverilog-devel] Accelerating Icarus with NVIDIA's GPUs

[Sumit G. <su...@nv...>]

Hi

Steve suggested I write to this group.

I am wondering if anyone has considered using GPU-based computing to
accelerate the Icarus Verilog simulator.

NVIDIA's GPUs have evolved over the years to become fully programmable,
massively parallel architectures. There are 128 processor cores with
floating point units in a NVIDIA GPU today delivering anywhere between
120 to 350 GFLOPs of performance depending on your application. We have
a C-based programming model called CUDA that has a wide developer
community around it.

Getting started just requires a NVIDIA GeForce 8-series GPU (88xx) and
the CUDA software tools are freely available at:
http://www.nvidia.com/cuda=20

I think the opportunity to parallelize will be in running many
evaluations on different threads and then coalescing the results.
NVIDIA's GPUs are very good at data number crunching and can handle
1000s of parallel threads.  However, doing a pure event-driven simulator
port may not be successful due to control-intensive nature of the algo.

But I am in no way an expert.

Regards
Sumit
(NVIDIA employee)

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