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Heidi Thornquist
Enabling Next-Generation Circuit Simulation Using Trilinos

Sandia National Laboratories
PO Box 5800
Albuquerque
NM 87185
hkthorn@sandia.gov
Erik Boman
Eric Keiter
Siva Rajamanickam
Rich Schiek

The Xyce Parallel Circuit Simulator, which has demonstrated scalable circuit simulation on hundreds of processors, heavily leverages the high-performance scientific libraries provided by Trilinos. With the move towards multi-core CPUs and GPU technology, retaining this scalability on future parallel architectures will be a challenge. The computational expense in traditional analog circuit simulation is in repeatedly solving linear systems of equations, which are at the center of a nested solver loop. Solving these linear systems requires their assembly, which depends upon device evaluations for the whole circuit. So, the computational expense is dominated by either the device evaluations or the numerical method used to solve the linear systems. This talk will present the enabling technologies provided by Trilinos to exploit both coarse and fine-grained parallelism, including a new effort in hybrid linear solvers, that will allow Xyce to retain scalable performance on next-generation architectures.





root 2012-02-20