The paper "Parallel and Heterogeneous Timing Analysis: Partition, Algorithm, and System" by Tsung-Wei Huang, Boyang Zhang, Dian-Lun Lin, and Cheng-Hsiang Chiu from the University of Wisconsin at Madison discusses the challenges and solutions for accelerating static timing analysis (STA) using CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing. The authors highlight the bottlenecks in STA due to its time-consuming nature, particularly in large designs with millions of gates. They introduce several strategies to improve STA performance:
1. **Task-Parallel STA Algorithms**: These algorithms enhance timing propagation performance by allowing asynchronous execution through task graph-based methods, which improve load balancing and reduce synchronization overhead compared to loop-based parallelism.
2. **Task Graph Partitioning**: This technique further optimizes scheduling performance by partitioning the task dependency graph (TDG) into clusters, reducing scheduling costs and improving runtime efficiency.
3. **GPU-Accelerated STA Algorithms**: The paper presents a GPU-accelerated path-based timing analysis (PBA) algorithm, which significantly reduces the runtime of PBA tasks, a critical component for achieving accurate timing results.
4. **Task-Parallel Programming System**: The authors have developed Taskflow, a general-purpose task-parallel programming system that generalizes their solutions to broader applications beyond STA, such as machine learning, hardware fuzzing, and quantum computing.
The paper includes experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of these strategies, showing significant improvements in runtime scalability and performance. The authors also discuss the challenges and limitations of each approach, providing insights into future research directions.The paper "Parallel and Heterogeneous Timing Analysis: Partition, Algorithm, and System" by Tsung-Wei Huang, Boyang Zhang, Dian-Lun Lin, and Cheng-Hsiang Chiu from the University of Wisconsin at Madison discusses the challenges and solutions for accelerating static timing analysis (STA) using CPU-GPU heterogeneous computing. The authors highlight the bottlenecks in STA due to its time-consuming nature, particularly in large designs with millions of gates. They introduce several strategies to improve STA performance:
1. **Task-Parallel STA Algorithms**: These algorithms enhance timing propagation performance by allowing asynchronous execution through task graph-based methods, which improve load balancing and reduce synchronization overhead compared to loop-based parallelism.
2. **Task Graph Partitioning**: This technique further optimizes scheduling performance by partitioning the task dependency graph (TDG) into clusters, reducing scheduling costs and improving runtime efficiency.
3. **GPU-Accelerated STA Algorithms**: The paper presents a GPU-accelerated path-based timing analysis (PBA) algorithm, which significantly reduces the runtime of PBA tasks, a critical component for achieving accurate timing results.
4. **Task-Parallel Programming System**: The authors have developed Taskflow, a general-purpose task-parallel programming system that generalizes their solutions to broader applications beyond STA, such as machine learning, hardware fuzzing, and quantum computing.
The paper includes experimental results demonstrating the effectiveness of these strategies, showing significant improvements in runtime scalability and performance. The authors also discuss the challenges and limitations of each approach, providing insights into future research directions.