CAREER: Parallel CAD Algorithms on Emerging Multi-Core Platforms

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Project ID: 0747423 Title: Parallel CAD Algorithms on Emerging Multi-Core PlatformsPI name: Li, Peng Inst.: Texas Engineering Experiment StationABSTRACTThe recent industry?s shift to multi-core processor technology has literally made every modern-day desktop, sever, and laptop a parallel computing system. With multiple processing elements, or cores, integrated on a single chip, multi-core processors offer unprecedented, ubiquitously available parallel compute power. The paradigm change in computing has profound impacts on computer-aided design (CAD) of today?s ever complex nanoscale integrated circuits. This CAREER project intends to address the new computing challenges and opportunities as the current serial CAD practices transition to the future massively parallel paradigms, as dictated by the need to keep up with the increase in design complexity. The central approach of this work is to bring indispensable domain knowledge to parallel algorithm design so as to facilitate the most efficient use of emerging parallel hardware. A rich set of application-level coarse-grained parallelisms will be exploited under the single and multiple algorithm contexts to gain good parallel processing efficiency on multi-core and many-core platforms. A range of parallel CAD algorithms, encompassing key analysis, modeling and optimization steps in the design flow, will be developed. This work will lead to massively parallel CAD frameworks and tools that are critical to the design of a wide spectrum of nanometer digital, analog and mixed-signal integrated applications. The computationally intensive nature of VLSI CAD makes it an important application domain of multi-core computing. The proposed work addresses the urgent need for developing parallel software applications and the resulting parallel computing paradigms are likely to be applicable to other science and engineering fields. As integral parts of this CAREER plan, education and research efforts will be integrated to provide research experience to undergraduate and graduate students. Research participation from minority and underrepresented student groups as well as K-12 education outreach will be actively promoted through existing research, outreach programs and inter-university collaborations. The PI will integrate the research outcomes of this project into undergraduate and graduate curriculum development and broadly disseminate them to academic, governmental and industrial sectors. Multidisciplinary, international and industrial collaborations will be formed to broaden the horizon of engineering students. Close industry ties will be leveraged to provide students with real-life experiences and facilitate immediate impacts of this work in industrial practice.