Wolverines: standard cell placement on a network of workstations

The authors point out that a typical computer-aided design environment consists of a number of workstations connected together by a high-speed local area network. A placement program that makes use of this distributed computing environment to achieve linear speedup without sacrificing the quality of the results obtained by the serial version of the program is presented. The placement program is based on the genetic algorithm, which is a heuristic search method inspired by biological evolution models. The parallel implementation has other desirable features such as the ability to operate in a heterogeneous network environment and dynamic and static load balancing. The implementation of the placement program and detailed experimental studies of the behavior of the algorithm with various parameter settings, network capabilities, and communication patterns are described