Research Initiation: Relational Databases in a Hierarchical Design Environment

作为管理日益复杂的工程的一种方式， 设计，设计自动化社区正在走向 分层设计工具的使用：对多个 正在设计的复杂结构的层表示， 因此，设计的较低的、更详细的方面并不 可见，直到用户特别要求查看这些 方面 这项研究将调查的影响， 层次化、高度交互式的设计环境， 数据库管理系统的性能要求 存储设计信息。 其他人完成的工作显示 扩展的关系数据库可以表现出令人满意的 设计环境中的数据检索性能，其中（1） 大量使用主存缓存，（2）非关系型 实现;（3）分层设计工具。 这项研究的目标是开发一个更细粒度的 检查数据检索和更新性能 分层设计工具的要求，并测试是否 使用一个 扩展关系数据库 为此，校长 调查人员将仪器魔术，分层超大规模集成电路布局 编辑器;收集专家设计师使用Magic的协议; 并根据适当的模型分析这些协议， 数据库访问成本。 该项目将包括一个本科生的支持 学生.

As a way of managing the growing complexity of engineering designs, the design automation community is moving towards the use of hierarchical design tools: tools that operate on multi- layer representations of the complex structures being designed, so that lower, more detailed aspects of a design are not visible until the user specifically requests to see those aspects. This research will investigate the impact of a hierarchical, highly interactive design environment on the performance requirements for a database management system storing design information. Work completed by others shows that extended relational databases can exhibit satisfactory data retrieval performance in a design environment with (1) heavy use of main-memory caching, (2) a non-relational implementation, and (3) hierarchical design tools. The goal of this research is to develop a finer-grained examination of the data retrieval and update performance requirements of hierarchical design tools, and to test whether satisfactory update performance can be obtained using an extended relational database. To this end, the principal investigator will instrument Magic, a hierarchical VLSI layout editor; collect protocols of Magic's use by expert designers; and analyze these protocols against appropriate models of database access costs. This project will include support for one undergraduate student.