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

[Stephen W. <st...@ic...>]

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Cary R. wrote:
> --- Sumit Gupta <su...@nv...> wrote: 
>> I am wondering if anyone has considered using GPU-based computing to
>> accelerate the Icarus Verilog simulator.
> 
> This certainly is interesting, but I think we would need to make the
> runtime multi threaded before starting something this ambitious. With the
> current crop of Duo and Quad machines available adding multi threading to
> Icarus has been one my mind. The problem is finding the time to work on
> it.

That's always been a problem because of the way that the Verilog
timing model works, and especially how behavioral and netlist code
interact in a Verilog design. Multi-threading Verilog simulations
is highly tricky.

>> 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.
> 
> Much of Icarus is bit based, so FLOPs are not as important as for an
> analog simulator. Though with those kind of numbers I'm sure they would be
> more than fast enough ;-).

Could be especially interesting when (if) analogue/mixed signal
gets added in to Icarus Verilog. I'm weak on how exactly all that
would work, but it seems likely that resolving a bunch of drivers
may be something that can usefully be handed off to a co-processor.


- --
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
steve at icarus.com           But I have promises to keep,
http://www.icarus.com         and lines to code before I sleep,
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