A scalable, serially-equivalent, high-quality parallel placement methodology suitable for modern multicore and GPU architectures

Abstract

Placement and routing run-times continue to dominate the automated FPGA design flow. As the size of FPGA architectures continue to grow exponentially, it remains critical to develop parallel tools for FPGA design where the amount of exposed concurrent work scales with the size of the designs to be synthesized. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for parallel placement, based on simulated annealing, where the amount of parallel work directly scales with the size of the net-list to be placed. Our approach concurrently evaluates and conditionally applies very large sets of non-conflicting swaps using common parallel computing primitives, including stream compaction, category reduction, and sort. While our design is suitable for targeting all modern parallel computing platforms, we present results from our implementation which targets NVIDIA's CUDA platform, where we achieve a mean speed-up of 19x over VPR with post-routing critical-path-delay and wire-length quality that matches or exceeds VPR. We believe that this work is an important step towards the development of a scalable, high-quality placement tool.