Compiling SPICE to an FPGA - A Retrospective
Nachiket Kapre
- 11:30 23rd November 2011 ( week 7, Michaelmas Term 2011 )147
Spatial processing of the SPICE circuit simulator using reconfigurable architectures (i.e. FPGAs) can deliver an order of magnitude speedup over conventional processors (i.e. Intel multi-core CPUs) for a range of benchmark circuits. SPICE has historically been hard to parallelize due to the irregular nature of the computation. In this talk, I show how to expose the different, irregular parallel patterns inherent in SPICE using a high-level, domain-specific framework capable of composing multiple patterns simultaneously on the same FPGA fabric. I will also briefly overview some recent, preliminary enhancements that can further improve the SPICE FPGA design.
Speaker bio
Nachiket Kapre is currently a Junior Research Fellow at Imperial College London. He received his PhD (2010) and M.S (2005-EE, 2006-CS) from California Institute of Technology, USA. His thesis shows how to effectively implement the SPICE circuit simulator using fine-grained, spatial FPGA logic through a domain-specific compilation flow and an application-specific compute organization. He is primarily interested in understanding and exploiting the potential of spatial parallelism for implementing computation. His broader research interests include parallel processing, high-level system architectures and domain-specific programming frameworks.Share this:
