Brown Engineering Professor Sherief Reda is a recipient of the 2024 Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award, recognizing the best paper published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (IEEE TCAD), the flagship journal of the IEEE Council on Electronic Design Automation (CEDA). "PACT: An Extensible Parallel Thermal Simulator for Emerging Integration and Cooling Technologies," was chosen as one of two winners in 2024.
Thermal analysis is crucial for designing computing systems alongside their cooling mechanisms. However, existing tools face challenges in addressing large-scale problems and long simulation times. To overcome these challenges, the team introduced a SPICE-based parallel compact thermal simulator (PACT) that achieves fast and accurate, standard cell to architecture-level, steady-state, and transient parallel thermal simulations. Compared to state-of-the-art tools like COMSOL and HotSpot, PACT offers significant speedups, reaching up to 200x, while maintaining accuracy.
PACT utilizes the advantages of multicore processing (OpenMPI) and includes several solvers to speed up both steady-state and transient simulations. PACT can be easily extended to model a variety of emerging integration and cooling technologies by simply modifying the thermal netlist. In addition, PACT can also be used with popular architecture-level performance and power simulators.
Reda collaborated with Professor A.K. Coskun at Boston University, BU Ph.D. graduates Zihao Yuan and Prachi Shukla and undergraduate Sean Nemtzow, and Brown Ph.D. graduate Sofiane Chetoui.
The Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award is based on the overall quality, the originality, the level of contribution, the subject matter and the timeliness of the research. The award is presented annually at the Design Automation Conference, held this year on June 27 in San Francisco, Calif.