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CKTSO----Parallel Sparse Direct Solver for Circuit Simulation

CKTSO is a high-performance parallel sparse direct solver specially designed for SPICE-based circuit simulation. CKTSO is the successor of NICSLU. CKTSO uses many similar techniques to NICSLU. However, CKTSO integrates some novel techniques and shows higher performance, better scalability and less memory usage than NICSLU, while NICSLU provides more functionalities. The most important features of CKTSO include

• a new pivoting-reduction technique that significantly improves the performance and scalability of parallel LU factorization with pivoting;
• a new memory allocation strategy that minimizes memory usage;
• parallel forward and backward substitutions;
• novel nested dissection ordering, which reduces the number of floating-point operations by up to several times for post-layout/mesh-style circuits, and it also produces fewer floating-point operations than METIS;
• novel minimum degree ordering variants, which reduce about 30-40% floating-point operations compared with mainstream methods (e.g., approximate minimum degree);
• an adaptive numerical kernel selection method.

CKTSO supports both real and complex matrices. Both row and column modes are supported.

CKTSO is easy to use. Only a single header file and a single shared-library are needed. No need to configure the header file or any macro definition. No additional dependency is needed. Only a few simple steps to compile and run the demos.

CKTSO has an associated GPU acceleration module, CKTSO-GPU, by using CUDA. It provides acceleration for re-factorization as well as forward and backward substitutions for slightly-dense circuit matrices.

Performance Results

CKTSO is extremely fast. For most circuit matrices from SuiteSparse Matrix Collection, CKTSO needs only a few to tens of milliseconds to solve.

Compared with the popular circuit solver KLU (sequential, using approximate minimum degree ordering), CKTSO is on average >3X faster when sequential and >25X faster when using 16 threads, based on the results of 66 circuit matrices from SuiteSparse matrix collection (dimensions from 1K to 5M).

Please refer to doc/results.pdf for the detailed performance comparisons with other solvers (including both CPU- and GPU-based solvers). On average, CKTSO is faster than KLU, NICSLU, Intel MKL PARDISO and two GPU-based sparse solvers for circuit matrices. The results of CKTSO are from an old version.

CKTSO achieves the fewest operations on average by the novel ordering methods, compared with other mainstream ordering methods such as approximate minimum degree and METIS. Please refer to doc/ordering.pdf for detailed comparisons.

Notes on Library and Integer Bitwidths

Only x86-64 libraries are provided. This means that, a 64-bit Windows or Linux operating system is needed.

Functions for both 32-bit integers and 64-bit integers are provided. The latter has '_L' in the function names. The integer bitwidth only limits the size of the input matrix. The internal data structures always use 64-bit integers.

Working Directions

I am now working on the following directions to further improve CKTSO:

• Faster GPU acceleration method;
• automated thread number control based on system workload (supported from 20240630);
• handling duplicated entries in input CSR format (supported from 20231101);
• ordering for post-layout, power grid, and mesh-like matrices (supported from 20231101).

Publications

[1] Xiaoming Chen, "CKTSO: High-Performance Parallel Sparse Linear Solver for General Circuit Simulations", IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (IEEE TCAD).

[2] Xiaoming Chen, "Numerically-Stable and Highly-Scalable Parallel LU Factorization for Circuit Simulation", in 2022 International Conference On Computer Aided Design (ICCAD'22).

Author

Please visit Xiaoming Chen's personal page.