[sdiy] SPICE and Processors

[Rainer Buchty]

On Sat, 25 Jul 2009, Neil Johnson wrote:

> <Looks to Rainer for a lecture on SIMD...>

:)

Actually, I have not the slightest idea whether SPICE in any of its 
incarnations can make proper use of parallel systems either by being 
programmed using some parallel programming models, be it plain pthreads 
or something more sophisticated like OpenMP or MPI (which is where the 
Quad Core might benefit) or using some data-parallel programming model 
like CUDA or OpenCL (where the graphics card with their numerous 
floating-point cores will do their good).

> As a quick example, running a phaser simulation in version 3 of 
> LTSpice with audio in and out I find a Core 2 Duo 2GHz 2GB machine 
> about 20% faster than a single-core Pentium-M 2GHz 1GB machine (both 
> Dell laptops, WinXP).

Which might well be related to cache and general task-switching issues 
leading to an overall more balanced execution of all running tasks and 
somewhat less L1$ clobbering, therefore having nothing to do with the 
potentially doubled processing power per se.

But thanks for the idea ... Will throw it at our parallel programming 
and application acceleration guys.

Rainer