Parallelizing Simulated Annealing-Based Placement Using GPGPU

Simulated annealing has became the de facto standard for FPGA placement engines since it provides high quality solutions and is robust under a wide range of objective functions. However, this method will soon become prohibitive due to its sequential nature and since the performance of single-core processor has stagnated. General purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) offers a promising solution to improve runtime with only commodity hardware. In this work, we develop a highly parallel approach to simulated annealing-based placement using GPGPU. We identify the challenges posed by the GPU architecture and describe effective solutions. An average speedup of about 10× was achieved over conventional placement within 3% of wirelength.