Multicore parallel min-cost flow algorithm for CAD applications

Computational complexity has been the primary challenge of many VLSI CAD applications. The emerging multicore and manycore microprocessors have the potential to offer scalable performance improvement. How to explore the multicore resources to speed up CAD applications is thus a natural question but also a huge challenge for CAD researchers. Indeed, decades of work on general-purpose compilation approaches that automatically extracts parallelism from a sequential program has shown limited success. Past work has shown that programming model and algorithm design methods have a great influence on usable parallelism. In this paper, we propose a methodology to explore concurrency via nondeterministic transactional algorithm design, and to program them on multicore processors for CAD applications. We apply the proposed methodology to the min-cost flow problem which has been identified as the key problem in many design optimizations, from wire-length optimization in detailed placement to timin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Yinghai Lu, Hai Zhou, Li Shang, Xuan Zeng
• Keywords: DAC 2009, Design Automation, Multicore Processors, Nondeterministic Transactional Algorithm, VLSI CAD Applications