An effective method to use GPU for rectangle packing

Abstract

As useful software tools for GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) have been provided, GPGPU (General Purpose computing on GPU) becomes popular recently. However, the usage of GPU in the field of CAD algorithm for VLSI has not been large yet. The reason of this is that algorithms in this field have a tendency such that they must change operations of the next step according to the result of the current step. Hence, introduction of parallelism is not easy. In this paper, we consider rectangle packing problem which is important to VLSI floorplan, and propose an algorithm which can employ GPU effectively. The algorithm is obtained by improving defects of temperature parallel simulated annealing algorithm. Experimental results for benchmark data show its effectiveness.