Expression-Level Parallelism for Distributed Spice Circuit Simulation

Abstract

Distributed system-level simulation among coordinated, heterogeneous simulators requires communication and synchrony to preserve event causality. Once achieved, multiple coordinated, distributed instances of a single simulator not originally written for internal parallelism can be used to conduct the expression-level parallel execution of a model partitioned into subsystems, such that each subsystem is assigned to an individual simulator. Using a Kahn Process Network simulation back plane for coordination, and a custom Xspice TCP/IP socket device for interfacing, expression-level distributed simulation was applied to observe a decrease of up to 1/52 times the transient analysis time of the same circuit in a single Ngspice instance, without modifying the Ngspice kernel or host execution environment. Up to 128 independent Ngspice instances were coordinated in parallel with this method, with a selectable tradeoff in speed versus accuracy.