Circuit simulation on workstation cluster

Tools for circuit simulation on transistor level are very important in the computer aided design of integrated circuits. They are widely offered in the market as a standard package on many different hardware platforms between PC and super computer [7]. But for large scale applications, for example to verify of DRAM's, the hardware platform is often a super computer. However, there are still some disadvantages of super computer because they often are very expensive and the memory does not scale with the increasing size of the circuits to be simulated. In recent years, the question of workstation cluster versus massively parallel computing has been a matter of ongoing discussion at conferences on high performance computing. Nowadays, most manufacturers of computers offer efficient MPP systems. Thanks to their high performance networks, very good speedup results are achieved. But to buy a massively parallel computer is still expensive and often a whole team is needed to service it. In this paper we present our implementation of two main types of circuits simulation, the transient analysis and the nonliear frequency analysis, on workstation cluster and it's results by large scale applications.