On 8/19/07, Farhan Mohamed Ali <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My university teaches some classes on P&R algorithms, according to a > friend of mine who took it the algos are not very complex. Don't know if > that is really true. But i think this is for ASICs, not FPGAs, maybe it's > harder for FPGAs because there are more restrictions.
Some of the research I've been doing lately has to do with performance-driven randomized algorithms. (That's not a technical term, just how I think about it.) So, we have these hard problems, in part because they're NP-hard but also because it's difficult to decide the best way to map the abstract logic to real gates--everything is influenced by the context of how all the other logic gates are mapped to real hardware. Using a genetic algorithm or simulated annealing or whatever, we can have the algorithm just TRY stuff, and we rate attempts based on the performance of the final result. I don't want to bore you with stuff you probably already know. The point is that the restrictions needn't be a major burden on us. Instead of deciding where to place something based on some prediction of how it'll perform, different placements are judged based on how they actually perform. The thing about simulated annealing, as compared to GAs, is that SA only has one population member. I suspect that it could be overwhelming to use a GA due to the memory requirements to represent one population member, and to make a GA work well, you need very many population members and a lot of processing time to manage each. It would be nice to have an algorithm that works reasonably well on your own PC. On the other hand, we could also develop something that takes advantage of clusters; imagine if Google or someone were to get interested and offered the ability to submit synthesis jobs to their cluster. -- Timothy Normand Miller http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti Open Graphics Project _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
