DP-Pack: Distributed Parallel Packing for FPGAs

Packing is one of the most critical stages in the FPGA physical syntheses flow. In this paper, we propose DP-Pack, a distributed parallel packing approach. DP-Pack consists of two primary steps. First, all of the minimal circuit units are assigned into several subsets where the conflicting units are located in the same subset and the non-conflicting units are distributed in different subsets. Then, the non-conflicting subsets are partitioned by round robin such that the number of subsets in each processor core is equal approximately, leading to good load balance in parallel packing. Second, the parallelization between processor cores is implemented by the MPI-based message queue in a distributed platform. Note that DP-Pack has been integrated into the VTR 7.0 tool. Experimental results show that our DP-Pack scales to 8 processor cores to provide about 1.4~3.2× runtime advantages with acceptable quality degradation, comparing to the academic state-of-the-art AAPack.