Parallel circuit simulation using the direct method on a heterogeneous cloud

This paper discusses the development of a parallel SPICE circuit simulator using the direct method on a cloud-based heterogeneous cluster, which includes multiple HPC compute nodes with multi-sockets, multicores, and GPUs. A simple model is derived to optimally partition the circuit between the compute nodes. The parallel simulator is divided into four major kernels: Partition Device Model Evaluation (PME), Partition Matrix Factorization (PMF), Interconnection Matrix Evaluation (IME), and Interconnection Matrix Factorization (IMF). Another model is derived to assign each of the kernels to the most suitable execution platform of the Amazon EC2 heterogeneous cloud. The partitioning approach using heterogeneous resources has achieved an order-of-magnitude speedup over optimized multithreaded implementations of SPICE using state of the art KLU and NICSLU packages for matrix solution.