| Q: | What is VCS multicore technology? |
| A: | VCS® multicore technology is the latest performance optimization innovation in VCS. It enables parallel verification of a design and its verification environment on multicore compute servers. The design, the verification applications (including testbench, assertions, coverage and debug), or a combination of the two can be run in parallel on multiple cores. |
| Q: | What is “design-level parallelism”? |
| A: | Design-level parallelism (DLP) is achieved by partitioning a design and simulating it on multiple processor cores in parallel. |
| Q: | What is “application-level parallelism”? |
| A: | Application-level parallelism (ALP) is achieved by enabling the various verification applications (including testbench, assertions, coverage and debug) to be executed on multiple cores in parallel. For example, on a quad-core compute server, one core could be executing coverage data capture, a second core could be executing assertion monitoring, a third core could be executing debug analysis, and the fourth core could be used to simulate the design. |
| Q: | How much speed-up can VCS multicore technology provide? |
| A: | The combination of DLP and ALP delivers up to 2x verification speed-up. |
| Q: | How does VCS multicore technology enable more verification and find more bugs in the design? |
| A: | VCS multicore technology enables faster verification for long-running testbenches. Thus, in a given time, designers are able to run more verification cycles and find more bugs in the design faster. |
| Q: | Does VCS multicore technology work over multiple servers on separate boxes? |
| A: | VCS multicore technology works on multiple cores or sockets on the same box. |
| Q: | What is the maximum number of cores supported by VCS multicore technology? |
| A: | VCS multicore technology can support any number of cores. It has been run on machines with varying numbers of cores from 2 cores to 32 cores. The software does not limit the number of cores the technology can be run on. |
| Q: | How many cores are used for design parallelism, typically? |
| A: | The number of cores used depends on the amount of parallelism that is possible in the design and the number of partitions created for parallelism. For example, 4 cores are sufficient if 4 partitions are created. |
| Q: | Does VCS multicore technology use multi-threading? |
| A: | VCS multicore technology uses different ways to achieve parallelism. Multi-threading as well as multi-processing technologies are used to achieve speed-up. |
| Q: | Does performance with VCS multicore technology increase with more cores? |
| A: | The performance speed-up depends on the extent of parallelism that can be achieved with design and applications. The more the environment can be parallelized, the higher the speed-up will be on multiple cores. Similarly, running a design that cannot be parallelized on many cores will not deliver any speed-up. |
| Q: | When will VCS multicore technology become available? |
| A: | VCS multicore technology is available in beta with the VCS 2009.06 release and is expected to go into general availability in the second half of 2009. |