OpenCL Sparse Linear Solver for Circuit Simulation

Sparse linear systems are found in a variety of scientific and engineering problems. In VLSI CAD tools, DC circuit analysis creates large, sparse systems represented by matrices and vectors. The algorithms designed to solve these systems are known to be quite time consuming and many previous attempts have been made to parallelize them. Graphics cards have evolved from specialized devices into massively parallel, general purpose computing units. With their parallel architecture and SIMD processing units, they are well designed for high-throughput operations on large matrices. Various APIs have been developed to allow users to access the resources of their GPUs. One relatively new API, OpenCL, provides a high level abstraction of GPU architecture. OpenCL, with its open source standard and support for both CPU and GPU compute devices, may become a dominant framework for parallel computing on GPUs in the future. Here, we test an OpenCL implementation of a sparse linear solver for VLSI CAD tools.