Workload Distribution in Fault Simulation

Simulation at the gate level is computationally very expensive. Parallel processing is one technique to reduce simulation time. Possessing knowledge of the distribution of computational activity in simulation can aid in parallelizing it efficiently. We present a new characterization of the distribution of the computational workload in fault simulation. Our empirical analysis shows that the workload distribution is circuit specific, and is independent of the vector set being simulated. A method to predict the workload distribution is also discussed. 1 Introduction Fault simulation is used in a number of test applications [1]. Parallel processing is one method to reduce simulation time and costs [2]. In general, the gains from parallelism have been limited and drop off sharply as the number of processors is increased [6]. To analyze performance, models have been developed to characterize computational activity [3, 4]. They show that the distribution of activity impacts parallel performa..