Submission Information

• Please try to submit a static binary as it helps with portability.

• Each team is allowed to submit a single binary that should run on all benchmarks. If the placer is split into multiple binaries, the same set of binaries should run on all benchmarks.

• For this contest we would like to evaluate single-threaded versions of the placement algorithms. Hence, no parallel implementations are allowed.

• A runtime limit will be enforced per benchmark. Any placer exceeding the runtime limit for a given benchmark will be terminated. More details will be provided later.

• No precomputed information can be used to influence the current run. The run directory will be cleaned prior to each run.

• Using third-party tools / libraries (e.g. solvers, etc.):
  • All requests to install third-party tools / libraries to run the placer should be made before or during the preliminary submission.
  • Please note, the contest administrator will only install public domain tools / libraries. No proprietary tools can be installed.
  
  
• Alpha (preliminary) binary submission on Mar 31, 2012:
  • To verify that the contest administrator can run the submitted binary on the contest machine. The administrator will work with the contestant(s) in case of any issues.
  • To test that the submitted binary is able to produce legal placement solutions on the released benchmarks.

• Memory limit per job: 16GB (= max allowed memory to run a benchmark). If a higher memory footprint is required contact the contest administrator.

• Machine configuration for the contest:
  • OS: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2. Kernel release: 2.6.18-92.el5
  • CPU: 64-bit Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X7560 @ 2.27GHz
  • GCC version: gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20071124 (Red Hat 4.1.2-42)
  • glibc version: 2.5
  • Library: Standard C/C++ library. For others please contact the contest administrator.
  • Tcl/Tk version: 8.4

Evaluation and Ranking

Global Routers for Contest Evaluation

• NCTU-GR 2.0,   Wen-Hao Liu and Prof. Yih-Lang Li, Department of Computer Science, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.
  Final Version (Contest Release Version: CRV2.1, updated May 14, 2012)

  • Related Publication:
    Wen-Hao Liu, Wei-Chun Kao, Yih-Lang Li, and Kai-Yuan Chao, “Multi-Threaded Collision-Aware Global Routing with Bounded-Length Maze Routing,”
    In Proc. Design Automation Conference, pp. 200-205, 2010.

• BFG-R 2.0,   Jin Hu, Jarrod A. Roy and Prof. Igor L. Markov, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
  Final Version (Contest Release Version: CRV1.1, updated May 14, 2012)

  • Related Publication:
    J. Hu, J. A. Roy, and I. L. Markov, “Completing High-quality Global Routes,”
    In Proc. International Symposium on Physical Design, pp. 35-41, 2010.

Contest Evaluation Script

• Usage:    dac2012_evaluate_solution.pl    [ options ]    < circuit.aux >    < placement solution >    < routing solution >
  dac2012_evaluate_solution     (Updated version released on May 14, 2012)

Evaluation Metric

• Contest flow and evaluation metric:   Evaluation_Metric.pdf.

• For each design, the teams will be ranked using the contest evaluation metric. The team with the lowest total rank across all the contest designs would win the contest.

Participating Teams