Parallelizing Sparse Matrix Solve for SPICE Circuit Simulation using FPGAs
Author
Kapre, Nachiket
DeHon, Andre
Date of Issue
2009-12Conference Name
2009 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT)
School
School of Computer Engineering
Version
Accepted version
Abstract
Fine-grained dataflow processing of sparse matrix-solve computation (Ax = b) in the SPICE circuit simulator can provide an order of magnitude performance improvement on modern FPGAs. Matrix solve is the dominant component of the simulator especially for large circuits and is invoked repeatedly during the simulation, once for every iteration. We process sparse-matrix computation generated from the SPICE-oriented KLU solver in dataflow fashion across multiple spatial floating-point operators coupled to high-bandwidth on-chip memories and interconnected by a low-latency network. Using this approach, we are able to show speedups of 1.2-64x (geometric mean of 8.8x ) for a range of circuits and benchmark matrices when comparing double-precision implementations on a 250 MHz Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA (65 nm) and an Intel Core i7 965 processor (45 nm).
Subject
Computer Science and Engineering
Type
Conference Paper
Rights
© 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. The published version is available at: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/FPT.2009.5377665].
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/FPT.2009.5377665
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