Fault partitioning issues in an integrated parallel test generation/fault simulation environment

The authors address the issues involved in providing an integrated test generation/fault simulation environment on a parallel processor. They propose heuristics to partition faults for parallel test generation with minimization of the overall run time and test length as an objective. For efficient utilization of available processors, the work load has to be balanced at all times. Since it is very difficult to predict a priori how difficult it is to generate a test for a particular fault, the authors propose a load-balancing method which uses static partitioning initially and then dynamic allocation of work for processors which become idle. They present experimental results based on an implementation on the Intel iPSC/2 hypercube multiprocessor using the ISCAS combinational benchmark circuits. The main contribution of the work described is to show that if one is not careful in the design of a parallel algorithm, apart from inefficient utilization of available processors, degradation in the quality of solutions can occur