Programming Pipelined CAD Applications on Message Passing Architectures

none6Programming applications in computer aided design of VLSI is difficult on parallel architectures, especially pipelined implementations derived from their sequential counterparts by algorithmic partitioning. The difficulty is primarily due to lack of good program development environments and tools. Our solution, applicable to message-passing architectures, is based upon a definition of a road class of nonlinear pipeline configurations and an synchronous data-driven model for pipeline stage interactions. It provides object-oriented definitions of stages and interconnecting channels. These objects are embedded in C++ so that the correctness of application programs can be tested on a workstation in a simulated environment. The simulation is so instrumented to provide data useful in assessing relative computational loading and balancing of stages. Thus a good part of program development can take place in the environment of a workstation familiar to the programmer. Two non-trivial applications are developed to illustrate these ideas.P. KENYON; S. SETH; P. AGRAWAL; A. CLEMATIS; G. DODERO; V. GIANUZZIP., Kenyon; S., Seth; P., Agrawal; A., Clematis; Dodero, Gabriella; Gianuzzi, Vittori

HGA: A Hardware-Based Genetic Algorithm

onald Minnich, Douglas Sweely, and Daniel Lopresti. Building and using a highly parallel programmable logic array. IEEE Computer, pages 81--89, January 1991. [13] David E. Goldberg. Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Incorporated, Reading, Massachusetts, 1989. [14] John J. Grefenstette and James E. Baker. How genetic algorithms work: A critical look at implicit parallelism. In J. David Schaffer, editor, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Genetic Algorithms, pages 20--27. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Incorporated, June 1989. [15] Paul Kenyon, Sharad Seth, Prathima Agrawal, Andrea Clematis, Gabriella Dodero, and Vittoria Gianuzzi. Programming pipelined CAD applications on message passing architectures. Submitted for publication, 1993. [16] Jonah McLeod. Reconfigurable computer changes architecture. Electronics, page 5, April 1994. [17] Mento