When you reach the level of silicon complexity of the modern GPU, typical simulation tools like PSpice and VHDL don’t cut it anymore. In a new post on the NVidia blog, they show some behind-the-scenes photos and technical specs on their massive Hardware Emulation platforms, giant car-sized machines that emulate a simple chip.
Near the front is Tigris, a snowflake-shape configuration of sixteen chassis that was built to emulate Fermi. It’s physically the biggest emulator in the lab, but no longer the most powerful. That title goes to Indus, a multimillion-dollar steel-blue piece of hardware a little longer than a minivan.
Three and a half years in the making, Indus was designed to handle Kepler, our next-generation chip architecture and the successor to Fermi. According to Nimish Modi, senior vice president for the System and Software Realization Group at Cadence, “Indus is the world’s largest installation of Cadence Verification Computing Platform systems, Palladium XP. It’s great working with a partner like NVIDIA to see how our technologies can work together to advance this industry.”
