Distributed Fault Simulation with Collaborative Load Balancing for VLSI Circuits

Abstract

In this paper we present a web-based distributed fault simulation framework built with standard Java Applet/Servlet technology and the popular platform independent open source database MySQL. Fault simulation plays an important role in digital electronics design flow by creating and evaluating test patterns, identifying and locating the causes of the circuit failures. Because of the rapid increase of the circuit sizes, there is ever growing need for memory and computational power. Our solution allows to seamlessly aggregate many remote computers for one application. We propose a novel collaboration centric computing approach using a participant credit based priority concept. Issues of task partitioning, task allocation, load balancing and model security are also handled. Our primary goal during circuit partitioning has been the decrease of the needed simulation memory to allow working with larger circuits for which conventional simulation methods are not always usable. Our novel method of partitioning produces model slices with no interdependences, suitable for Internet based use. Larger scalability is achieved by using model partitioning along the test pattern set partitioning.