Parallel Standard Cell Placement on a Cluster of Workstations

Nael Abu-Ghazaleh
nael@cs.binghamton.edu
Faris Khundakjie 
Patrick Madden 

State University of New York at Binghamton 

In this paper we report experiences on a parallel implementation of a
standard cell placement algorithm on a cluster of myrinet connected
PCs. The proposed algorithm is based on a recently developed placement
tool (called Feng Shui) that extends recursive bisection placement to
incorporate global aspects of the design. This is achieved using an
efficient and novel optimization called iterative deletion. We
investigate several algorithmic and system-level optimizations.
Contrary to previous attempts at parallelizing placement algorithms,
initial experimental results show significant performance improvement
with small reduction in the placement quality. Furthermore, the
reduction in the placement quality does not increase with the number of
processors.

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