Hierarchical simulation-based verification of Anton, a special-purpose parallel machine

—One of the major design verification challenges in the development of Anton, a massively parallel special-purpose machine for molecular dynamics, was to provide evidence that computations spanning more than a quadrillion clock cycles will produce valid scientific results. Our verification methodology addressed this problem by using a hierarchy of RTL, architectural, and numerical simulations. Block- and chip-level RTL models were verified by means of extensive co-simulation with a detailed C++ architectural simulator, ensuring that the RTL models could perform the same molecular dynamics computations as the architectural simulator. The output of the architectural simulator was compared to a parallelized numerical simulator that produces bitwise identical results to Anton, and is fast enough to verify the long-term numerical stability of computations on Anton. These explicit couplings between adjacent levels of the simulation hierarchy created a continuous verification chain from mol...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICCD
• Authors: John P. Grossman, John K. Salmon, Richard C. Ho, Doug Ierardi, Brian Towles, Brannon Batson, Jochen Spengler, Stanley C. Wang, Rolf Mueller, Michael Theobald, Cliff Young, Joseph Gagliardo, Martin M. Deneroff, Ron O. Dror, David E. Shaw
• Keywords: C++ Architectural Simulator, Hardware, ICCD 2008, Molecular Dynamics Computations, RTL Models