PARALLEL SWITCHED CIRCUIT SIMULATION ON NETWORKED WORKSTATIONS

A parallel nonlinear switched circuit simulator based on a modified wa veform-Newton (WN) algorithm is implemented on a cluster of workstatio ns linked by Ethernet. The secant method is integrated into the WN alg orithm to detect efficiently zero-crossings that control switch operat ions. The program is written in C++, taking advantage of object-orient ed programming techniques. Interprocessor communication is implemented by TCP/IP, to transmit floating-point numbers in a simple architectur e-independent manner. Network tests conducted on the 156 subnet in the Berkeley. EDU domain show that the communication overhead is not very high. Absolute speed-ups of a factor of two have been demonstrated wi th five workstations for some test cases.