Re: gEDA: Hardware accelerated simulation

[Stephen Williams <steve@icarus.com>]

pmonta@halibut.imedia.com said:
> I'm wondering how practical it might be to run simulations on
> general-purpose clusters, similar to the Beowulf effort for scientific
> computation.

Well, you need one general purpose processor to do the behavioral stuff,
including system tasks. This is necessary and doesn't divide into
multiple threads very easily.

The structural parts of the simulation, however, are much more bit oriented
and highly parallel. I'm wondering if one can design a specialized
processor around the problem of simulating a structural design. Since
this processor would be implemented by a gate array, it might be possible
for the compiler to even specialize the processor to the needs of the
design.

I'm not making much sense because I'm not really sure how this would work.
However, I am pretty sure I'm not talking about prototyping, but making
a specialized simulation processor. It would probably look something like
a data flow processor.
-- 
Steve Williams                "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
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