Parallel switched circuit simulation on networked workstations

A parallel nonlinear switched circuit simulator based on a modified waveform-Newton (WN) algorithm is implemented on a cluster of workstations linked by ethernet. The secant method is integrated into the WN algorithm to efficiently detect zero crossings that control switch operations. The program is written in C++, taking advantage of object oriented programming techniques. Inter-processor communication is implemented by TCP/IP, and is architecture independent with all transferred data in ASCII format. 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 with five workstations, and analysis indicates that greater speed-ups are feasible with larger networks.