Publications

The Xyce Parallel Electronic Simulator - An Overview

Hutchinson, Scott A.; Keiter, Eric R.; Hoekstra, Robert J.; Watts, Herman A.; Waters, Lon J.; Schells, Regina L.; Wix, Steven D.

The Xyce{trademark} Parallel Electronic Simulator has been written to support the simulation needs of the Sandia National Laboratories electrical designers. As such, the development has focused on providing the capability to solve extremely large circuit problems by supporting large-scale parallel computing platforms (up to thousands of processors). In addition, they are providing improved performance for numerical kernels using state-of-the-art algorithms, support for modeling circuit phenomena at a variety of abstraction levels and using object-oriented and modern coding-practices that ensure the code will be maintainable and extensible far into the future. The code is a parallel code in the most general sense of the phrase--a message passing parallel implementation--which allows it to run efficiently on the widest possible number of computing platforms. These include serial, shared-memory and distributed-memory parallel as well as heterogeneous platforms. Furthermore, careful attention has been paid to the specific nature of circuit-simulation problems to ensure that optimal parallel efficiency is achieved even as the number of processors grows.