SHF: Small: A General-purpose Parallel and Heterogeneous Task Graph Computing System for VLSI CAD

超大规模集成电路（VLSI）实现中不断增加的设计复杂性很快将远远超过许多现有的计算机辅助设计（CAD）工具在合理的设计时间和精力下所能扩展的范围。一个关键的基本挑战是，CAD必须结合由多核中央处理单元（cpu）和图形处理单元（gpu）组成的新的并行范例，以实现性能和生产力的转型里程碑。然而，如果没有一种新的计算系统来解决并行化CAD的实现复杂性，如不规则任务并行、大型CPU-GPU依赖任务、动态控制流和分布式计算等，这一目标是不可能实现的，而主流并行计算系统无法有效地表达和执行这些复杂性。该项目研究了一种新的计算系统，通过帮助每个人有效地解决在异构节点上设计、实现和部署并行CAD算法的挑战，来推进当前最先进的技术。拟议的开源软件和教育活动将促进技术转让，并在一个多学科社区中实现不同的工业-学术界合作。本项目旨在通过研究一种由三个主要组件组成的新型计算系统，简化异构节点上并行CAD工具的构建：(1)一个新的并行和异构任务图编程模型，使CAD开发人员能够使用最少的编程工作量来表达端到端的并行性；(2)一个高效的系统运行时，支持编程模型，在延迟、能源效率和吞吐量方面进行高性能优化；(3)新的异构算法和框架，加速耗时的物理合成任务和定时关闭流。此外，该项目还建立了异构图划分和任务调度的新公式和理论结果，这些公式和理论结果可推广和扩展到任意异构领域。该项目的成果是开源的，以鼓励广泛的CAD研究人员和开发人员参与并为该项目做出贡献，以分享新的发现、想法、教育资源和技术。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The ever-increasing design complexity in very-large-scale integration (VLSI) implementation will soon far exceed what many existing computer-aided design (CAD) tools can scale with reasonable design time and effort. A key fundamental challenge is that CAD must incorporate new parallel paradigms comprising many-core central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) to achieve transformational performance and productivity milestones. However, this goal is impossible to achieve without a novel computing system to tackle the implementation complexities of parallelizing CAD, such as irregular task parallelism, large CPU-GPU dependent tasks, dynamic control flow, and distributed computing, which cannot be expressed and executed efficiently with mainstream parallel computing systems. The project investigates a new computing system to advance the current state-of-the-art by assisting everyone to efficiently tackle the challenges of designing, implementing, and deploying parallel CAD algorithms on heterogeneous nodes. The proposed open-source software and education activities will facilitate technology transfers and enable diverse industry-academia collaborations in a multidisciplinary community.This project aims to streamline the building of parallel CAD tools on heterogeneous nodes by researching a novel computing system that consists of three major components: (1) a new parallel and heterogeneous task graph programming model that enables CAD developers to express end-to-end parallelism using minimal programming effort, (2) an efficient system runtime to support the programming model with high performance optimized across latency, energy efficiency, and throughput, and (3) new heterogeneous algorithms and frameworks to speed up time-consuming physical synthesis tasks and timing closure flow. Furthermore, the project is establishing new formulations and theory results for heterogeneous graph partitioning and task scheduling that are generalizable and scalable to arbitrary heterogeneous domains. Outcomes of the project are being made open-source to encourage a wide range of CAD researchers and developers to participate in and contribute to the project for sharing new findings, ideas, educational resources, and technology.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.