Case study of gate-level logic simulation on an extremely fine-grained chip multiprocessor

Explicit-multi-threading (XMT) is a parallel programming approach for exploiting on-chip parallelism. Its fine-grained single program multiple data (SPMD) programming model is suitable for many computing intensive applications. In this paper, we present a parallel gate level logic simulator implemented on an XMT platform and study its performance. Test results show potential for achieving more than a hundred-fold speedup over a serial implementation. This indicates an interesting possibility for a certain type of a single chip multicore architecture: use an existing easy-to-program API, such as VHDL or Verilog, for reduced application-software development time and better performance over serial performance-driven languages, such as C.