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PACT: A Standard Cell Level to Architectural Level Parallel Compact Thermal Simulator

Introduction

PACT is a SPICE-based PArallel Compact Thermal simulator (PACT) that enables fast and accurate standard-cell-level to architecture-level steady-state and transient parallel thermal simulation. PACT utilizes the advantages of multi-core processing (OpenMPI) and includes several solvers to speed up both steady-state and transient simulations. PACT can be easily extended to model a variety of emerging integration and cooling technologies, such as 3D stacking, liquid cooling via microchannels, and others, by simply modifying the thermal netlist. PACT can be also used in conjunction with popular architecture-level performance and power simulators to evaluate thermal profiles of processors.

The simulation flow of PACT is shown in the following image.

<!-- ![](/image/PACTflow.PNG|width=100) --> <center><img src="/image/PACTflow.PNG" width="600" height="300">

PACT takes a configuration file, a floorplan file, a layer (lcf) file, a parameter (modelParams) file, and a power trace (ptrace) file as inputs and outputs the steady-state/transient temperature results.

<!--- The config file describes the material property, initial temperature, as well as cooling package information. The floorplan file describes the chip information that includes chip size, number of blocks, block sizes and location, and block material property. Lcf file stands for the layer configuration file, which basically shows the layer stack with cooling information. Ptrace file allocates the power number for each active block inside the chip stack. ModelParams file shows the simulation information (e.g., steady-state/transient, solver type, number of grids, package information, etc.) -->

More details about PACT can be found in our TCAD paper [1].

All the source codes that are located inside the /src folder include the SuperLU solver as well as the SPICE solvers. Steady-state and transient SPICE-based solvers are named as SPICE_steady and SPICE_transient, respectively.

Requirements

PACT is written in Python and uses Xyce 6.12 as the backend SPICE engine.

pip install -r requirements.txt

The above libraries are sufficient for the users to run PACT with the SuperLU solver. For users who want to run PACT with the SPICE engine, one needs to install either Xyce 6.12 serial version or Xyce 6.12 parallel version.

Installation guideline for Xyce 6.12:

Users who want to run parallel thermal simualtions with PACT need to install Xyce 6.12 parallel version and OpenMPI 3.1.4:

Note: It is recommended to use Linux or macOS to run PACT.

If Xyce 6.12 and OpenMPI 3.1.4 have already been installed in your Linux server, then you can simply load the following dependencies to load Xyce and OpenMPI.

module load python3/3.6.5 gcc/5.5.0 fftw/3.3.8 netcdf/4.6.1 blis/0.6.0 openmpi/3.1.4 xyce/6.12

SPICE Engine Update

PACT is compatible with the latest verison of Xyce, which is Xyce 7.4. To run PACT with Xyce 7.4, users need to install either Xyce 7.4 serial version or Xyce 7.4 parallel version.

Installation guideline for Xyce 7.4:

If Xyce 7.4 and OpenMPI 3.1.4 have already been installed in your Linux server, then you can simply load the following dependencies to load Xyce and OpenMPI.

module load openmpi/3.1.4_gnu-10.2.0 xyce/7.4

DownLoad ML Regression Models

To simulate the learning-based temperature-dependent HTC simulation framework and two-phase vapor chambers with the hybrid wick evaporators model discussed in [9], users need to run the following script to download and extract the regression models:

python DownloadML.py

Usage

  1. Config file (i.e., ./Example/config_files/) describes the layer material properties.
    1. Thickness defines the layer thickness.
    2. HTC is the heat transfer coefficient between the ambient and the heat sink.
    3. Thermal resistivity and specific heat capacity are used to calculate the thermal resistor and capacitor values.
    4. [Init] defines the ambient temperature.
    5. Users can select the heat sink as well as its parameters.
  2. Floorplan (i.e., ./Example/flp_files/ (.CSV file)) describes the chip floorplan.
    1. Depending on the desired simulation granularity, users can define a standard-cell-level chip floorplan with a large number of units or an architecture-level floorplan that includes microarchitectural hardware blocks.
    2. UnitName is the name of the unit.
    3. X and Y define the location of the unit.
    4. Length (m) and Width (m) describe the unit size.
    5. Label describes the material or the cooling property of the unit.
    6. ConfigFile option/column is deprecated, which is used for two-phase cooling previously. Now users can declare material properites in Config file and add cooling library in Model parameter file. Example
  3. Layer configuration file (i.e., ./Example/lcf_files/ (.CSV file)) describes the layer stack.
    1. Layer describes the layer number; all layers are stacked vertically starting from layer 0, where layer 0 is the closest from the package/heat sink.
    2. Floorplan file describes the floorplan for the specific layer.
    3. PtraceFile: if a layer is active (consumes power), then its corresponding power trace file needs to be specified here.
  4. Power trace file (i.e., ./Example/ptrace_files/ (.CSV file)) provides the transient power consumption.
    1. UnitName is the name of the unit in the floorplan.
    2. Power (W) is the power consumption for the unit.
  5. Model parameter files (i.e., ./Example/modelParams_files/):
    1. [PATH] defines the path to the library, ptrace, flp.
    2. [Simulation] defines the simulation type (e.g, steady-state or transient).
    3. [Solver] selects the solver (SuperLU, SPICE_steady, SPICE_transient).
    4. [Grid] is the number of grid cells used in the simulation.
    5. Users can also define the heat sink characteristics, cooling properties, and other cooling options.
  6. Command to run simulation with PACT: 
    python PACT.py <lcf_file> <config_file> <modelParams_file> --gridSteadyFile <grid_file>
    For steady-state simulation, the grid_file specifies the steady-state grid temperature output of the PACT simulation. For transient simulation, the last step transient grid temperature results will be saved in grid_file. In the meantime, both the transient grid temperature traces and the transient block temperature traces will be saved.

Options for Solvers:

We divide the solver section into high-level solvers as well as low-level solvers. High-level solvers include SuperLU and SPICE solvers. Low-level solvers include KLU, KSparse, TRAP, BE, etc.

High-level solvers

Go to the '[Solver]' section in the modelParam file and modify both the solver name as well as the wrapper file. For using the SPICE solver, you have to have the Xyce 6.12 installed on your system. Supported high-level solvers are listed below:

SuperLU (only for steady-state):

SPICE_steady (.OP):

Steady-state SPICE solver grid temperature files are saved as {ChipName}.cir.csv. Steady-state SPICE solver log files are saved as {ChipName}.log. The steady-state block-level temperatures will be printed in the terminal.

SPICE_transient (.TRAN):

Users can modify the step_size, total_simualtion_time, and ptrace_step_size options under the [Simulation] section in modelParams_files to redefine the simulation step size and simulation time, and ptrace step size of the transient simulation, respectively. Transient SPICE solver grid temperature files are saved as {ChipName}.cir.csv. Transient SPICE solver block temperature files are saved as {ChipName}.block.transient.csv. SPICE solver log files are saved as {ChipName}.log. The last step block_level transient temperature results will be printed in the terminal.

Low-level solvers

To change the low-level solver types for SPICE solver, users need to modify the ll_steady_solver or ll_transient_solver option under the [Solver] section in modelParams_files. Note that, SuperLU solver does not support low-level solver.

Available solvers and usage can be found in [1] and Xyce user guide:

https://xyce.sandia.gov/downloads/_assets/documents/Users_Guide.pdf

Iterative Solver Convergence Issue

When doing steady-state simulations with iterative solvers such as AztecOO, for some of the problems, there might be a convergence issue. PACT will report "time step too small" error. To avoid this, users need to change the steady-state solver for both steady-state and transient to direct solvers such as KLU or KSparse. We set the DC analysis (steady-state) solver as KLU for transient simulation as default. To achieve the transient simulation performance as discussed in [1], users need to remove the LINSOL TYPE option in the SPICESolver_transient.py.

Enable Parallel Thermal Simulation:

To enable Parallel Thermal Simulation with PACT, users need to install the Xyce 6.12 parallel version and OpenMPI 3.1.4. One needs to modify the numberof_core option in the modelParams_files [Simulation] section to change the number of cores used in the PACT parallel simulation. Note that, to run parallel simulations on a Linux server, users need to start an interactive session by running _qrsh or qsh. Or, users can submit batch jobs by using qsub. Note that, SuperLU solver does not support parallel thermal simulation, it only supports sequential thermal simulation. If the users are running PACT with serial version of Xyce 6.12, please set number_of_core to 1.

Enable Transient Thermal Simulation with an Initial Temperature File:

To enable transient thermal simulation with an initial temperature file, users should typically first run a steady-state simulation to generate the initial temperature file (e.g., {ChipName}.cir.ic). Then, users need to set init_file = True in the [Simulation] section in modelParams.config file. Then PACT will include the initial temperature file as the initial temperatures for each node and carry out the transient simulation. Note that the grid resolution for steady-state simulation and transient simulation have to be the same (Xyce SPICE engine will raise an error if the grid resolution does not match). We recommend always running a steady-state simulation first before running a transient simulation with an initial temperature file.

Modeling Emerging On-Chip Cooling Methods

The current version of PACT includes a medium-cost heat sink adopted from HotSpot [2], a fixed-air convection HTC heat sink, liquid cooling via microchannels model [6], two-phase vapor chambers with micropillar wick evaporator [7,8], and two-phase vapor chambers with hybrid wick evaporator [9].

We have also built emerging cooling packages such as thermoelectric coolers [6]. We will add the TEC model to the PACT repository later on.

OpenROAD Interface:

Please go to the ./src/OpenRoad/ folder for more information.

VisualPACT:

VisualPACT is a video generation tool that can be used to generate a .avi heatmap video from transient PACT simulation data. Please go to the ./VisualPACT/ folder for more information.

Example Command Line Test Case:

The Example_command_line folder contains all the necessary files to run steady-state and transient simulations of a 10mmX10mm chip with a 500um hot spot placed at the center. The example_ptrace.csv contains 3 power traces. For steady-state simulation, PACT will average the power trace for each block and perform steady-state simulations. For transient simulation, PACT with SPICE_transient solver will run with a user-defined ptrace step size, a simulation step size, and a total simulation time. Users can define these 3 parameters in example_modelParams.config.

The default heat sink is a medium-cost heat sink adopted from HotSpot [2]. Users can uncomment the [NoPackage] and [NoPackage_sec] labels and comment out [HeatSink] and [HeatSink_sec] labels in example_modelParams.config to enable the fixed-air convection heat sink. In addition, users also need to uncomment the [NoPackage] label and comment out the [HeatSink] label in the example.config file.

Users can run this command line test case by typing the following command inside the Example_command_line folder:

python ../src/PACT.py example_lcf.csv example.config example_modelParams.config --gridSteadyFile example.grid.steady

The layerwise grid temperature results will be saved as example.grid.steady.layer0 and example.grid.steady.layer1. Here layer0 is the processor and layer1 is the cooling package. The steady-state and transient SPICE simulation grid temperature results will be saved as example.cir.csv. The transient block temperature results will be saved as example.block.transient.csv. The SPICE simulation log information will be saved as example.log.

Note that, this command line test case assumes the users have already installed the Xyce 6.12 parallel version and OpenMPI 3.1.4. If the users have not installed these two software, please change the solver to SuperLU and change the heat sink to NoPackage. If the users are running the serial version of PACT, please make sure you set the number_of_core option in the example_modelParams.config to 1.

Example Script Test Cases:

We have provided several script test cases in the Example folder for the users to test.

To run thermal simulations, go to /Example/scripts/ and run qsub_10mm.py, qsub_20mm.py, and qsub_Hetero_500um.py as shown below:

    $cd Example/scripts/
    $python qsub_10mm.py

or

    $cd Example/scripts/
    $python qsub_20mm.py

or

    $cd Example/scripts/
    $python qsub_Hetero_500um.py

You can choose various synthetic power profiles, floorplans, and test cases within the python script.

qsub_10mm.py: steady-state and transient analysis for homogeneous chips with a chip size of 10mm with both uniform power density and non-uniform power density profiles.

qsub_20mm.py: steady-state and transient analysis for homogeneous chips with a chip size of 20mm with both uniform power density and non-uniform power density profiles.

qsub_Hetero_500um.py: steady-state and transient analysis for chips with heterogeneous layers (Copper and Silicon) with chip sizes of 5mm,10mm, and 20mm with non-uniform power density profiles. Users can select different hot spot locations and the number of hot spots.

Note that, these example script test cases assume the users have already installed the Xyce 6.12 parallel version and OpenMPI 3.1.4. If the users haven't installed these two software, please change the solver to SuperLU. If the users are running PACT with serial version of Xyce 6.12, please make sure you set the number_of_core option in the modelParams files to 1.

Users can also modify the corresponding modelParam files in the /Example/modelParams_files/ to select the simulation type as well as the solver.

For simulation using SPICE solvers, users can find the SPICE solver grid temperature simulation results located in /Example/results/{ChipName} folder as {ChipName}.cir.csv. Users can also find the SPICE transient block temperature results in /Example/results/ folder as {ChipName}.block.transient.csv. The SPICE solver log files are located in /Example/results/{ChipName} folder as {ChipName}.log. For simulation using SuperLU, users can find the grid temperature simulation results and log files in /Example/results/ and /Example/logs/ folders. For steady-state simulation, the block-level temperature results will be printed in the terminal. For transient simulation, the last step of the block-level transient temperature results will be printed in the terminal.

Example block-level temperature output:

<!-- ![](/image/output.PNG) --> <center><img src="/image/output.PNG" width="600" height="300"> Here layer0 is the processor and layer1 is the cooling package.

Example Tutorial Video (UBooth @ DAC):

<a id="demo video" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yFDCPk7UHs" target="_blank"><img src="https://img.youtube.com/vi/8yFDCPk7UHs/0.jpg" alt="Ubooth @ DAC tutorial" width="600" height="300" /></a>

Citation and License:

PACT is licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 license. If you use PACT for your publications, please cite our TCAD paper [1].

Running PACT & VisualPACT through Docker

This repository provides a Dockerfile to run PACT and VisualPACT using Docker containers. The following steps outline how to set up and run the containers:

Prerequisites

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Overview

To allow for flexibility, the docker file is setup so that when the container is started;

How to run

In order to achieve the flexibility described above, the workflow to run simulations with docker is a bit involved. The general workflow goes as follows;

  1. Clone the PACT repository to your local machine.
  2. Build the docker image
docker build -t imagename .

'.' here is a path signifying where the Dockerfile is located. As such, the above command should be run while in the root folder. "imagename" can be anything.

  1. Run the image with arguments to;

    • a. specify a local directory that should be attached to "/opt/app/Input" inside the container.

    • b. get access to the container's command line once it starts running.

docker run -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -it  -v $(pwd)/path-to-folder-with-input-files:/opt/app/Input imagename /bin/bash

"-v $(pwd)/path-to-folder-with-input-files:/opt/app/Input" satisfies 3a.

"/bin/bash" satisfies 3b.

Replace path-to-folder-with-input-files with a folder of your choosing. For eg, to use the Intel folder in this repo, run

docker run -u $(id -u):$(id -g) -it -v $(pwd)/Intel:/opt/app/Input imagename /bin/bash
  1. While inside the running container's command line, run PACT.py with arguments in the format shown below.
python3 PACT.py <lcf_file> <config_file> <modelParams_file> --gridSteadyFile <grid_file>

Replace the arguments with files in the input folder you attached to. For eg, if you attached to the Intel folder, run

python3 PACT.py ../Input/Intel_ID1_lcf.csv ../Input/Intel.config ../Input/modelParams_Intel.config --gridSteadyFile ../Input/Intel.grid.steady

Note: The local directory name with the input files is whatever you want! But, the container directory name that has the inputs is always Input. (Like the example above. Local name: Intel, container name: Input)

P.S. While the simualtion is running in docker, you may see repetitive command line logs that look like this

[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 46967, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 49216, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 49657, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 18750, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 17956, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 21925, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 19897, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 18050, errno = 1
[f6e9dc540c36:00030] Read -1, expected 20819, errno = 1
...

Simply ignore this and watch the Xyce produced log file (added to the same folder as the input files) instead.

Note: The Dockerized version still has some problems running in Windows. So, we highly recommend using Linux-based or MAC OS to run the dockerized version!

To run the VisualPACT, you could use the container's command line to run the VisualPACT.py in the VisualPACT directory. Currently, running through docker will only create the frames for you and will not generate the video. So we highly recommend running the VisualPACT locally on your device with the outputs generated from the PACT VisualPACT documentation

Developers:

Principal Investigators:

Prof. Ayse K. Coskun, Boston University, http://people.bu.edu/acoskun

Prof. Sherief Reda, Brown University, https://scale.engin.brown.edu/pages/sreda.html

Acknowledgment

PACT has been partially funded by the NSF CRI (CI-NEW) grant #1730316/1730003/1730389 and NSF CCF grant #1910075/1909027.

Some of the features in the PACT frontend have been implemented with inspiration from HotSpot [2], such as the structure of the network of grid cells and blocks, file structure (e.g., lcf, flp, ptrace files), and the building of the matrices for the SuperLU solver. This is a design decision to ease the use of PACT for the community.

Contact Us

If you have questions or suggestions regarding PACT, we encourage subscribing and posting to the PACT users group: https://groups.google.com/g/pact-simulator.

References

[1] Z. Yuan, P. Shukla, S. Chetoui, S. Nemtzow, S. Reda and A. K. Coskun, "PACT: An Extensible Parallel Thermal Simulator for Emerging Integration and Cooling Technologies," to appear in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, 2021, doi:10.1109/TCAD.2021.3079166.

[2] Kevin Skadron, Mircea R. Stan, Wei Huang, Sivakumar Velusamy, Karthik Sankaranarayanan, and David Tarjan. "Temperature-aware microarchitecture," in Proceedings of the 30th annual international symposium on Computer architecture (ISCA '03). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2–13. doi:10.1145/859618.859620.

[3] Prachi Shukla, Ayse K. Coskun, Vasilis F. Pavlidis, and Emre Salman. "An Overview of Thermal Challenges and Opportunities for Monolithic 3D ICs," in Proceedings of the Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 439–444. doi:10.1145/3299874.3319485.

[4] Ayse Coskun, Furkan Eris, Ajay Joshi, Andrew B. Kahng, Yenai Ma, and Vaishnav Srinivas. "A cross-layer methodology for design and optimization of networks in 2.5D systems," in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 101, 1–8. doi:https:10.1145/3240765.3240768.

[5] Tutu Ajayi, Vidya A. Chhabria, Mateus Fogaça, Soheil Hashemi, Abdelrahman Hosny, Andrew B. Kahng, Minsoo Kim, Jeongsup Lee, Uday Mallappa, Marina Neseem, Geraldo Pradipta, Sherief Reda, Mehdi Saligane, Sachin S. Sapatnekar, Carl Sechen, Mohamed Shalan, William Swartz, Lutong Wang, Zhehong Wang, Mingyu Woo, and Bangqi Xu. "Toward an Open-Source Digital Flow: First Learnings from the OpenROAD Project," in Proceedings of the 56th Annual Design Automation Conference (DAC '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 76, 1–4. doi:10.1145/3316781.3326334.

[6] F. Kaplan, M. Said, S. Reda and A. K. Coskun, "LoCool: Fighting Hot Spots Locally for Improving System Energy Efficiency," in IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 895-908, April 2020, doi:10.1109/TCAD.2019.2902355.

[7] Z. Yuan, G. Vaartstra, P. Shukla, S. Reda, E. Wang and A. K. Coskun, "Two-Phase Vapor Chambers with Micropillar Evaporators: A New Approach to Remove Heat from Future High-Performance Chips," in Proceeding of the 18th IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems (ITherm), 2019, pp. 456-464, doi:10.1109/ITHERM.2019.8757412.

[8] Z. Yuan, G. Vaartstra, P. Shukla, S. Reda, E. Wang and A. K. Coskun, "Modeling and Optimization of Chip Cooling with Two-Phase Vapor Chambers," in Proceeding of the IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), 2019, pp. 1-6, doi:10.1109/ISLPED.2019.8824965.

[9] Z. Yuan, G. Vaartstra, P. Shukla, Zhengmao Lu, E. Wang, S. Reda, and A. K. Coskun, "A Learning-Based Thermal Simulation Framework for Emerging Two-Phase Cooling Technologies," in Proceeding of the Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2020, pp. 400-405, doi:10.23919/DATE48585.2020.9116480.