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Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

juliacomputing.com

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Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#51

Post by 7_my_mind »

Trex_Egg wrote: post #6
7_my_mind wrote: post #4

Is scientific computing getting some revival with the advent of quantum computers? From what I could see the niche is relatively small and not well paid, with most jobs somehow tied to the public sector. Not sure how Julia factors into all of this. I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately. Very interesting field at the intersection of all my skills, but I'm hesitant to get int…

Just curious, what's your current works involves?

I'm a math grad student studying numerics and scientific computing actually. But I do not see a future in it as it does not seem to pay well and the relevant jobs are scarce. So it seems risky to get into it as a career when I can pivot to a more profitable SWE role or do something with ML.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#52

Post by ThJ »

KenoFischer wrote: post #36
kumarvvr wrote: post #18

Can anyone explain the potential benefits of accelerating electronics simulation? Do they want to generate efficient FPGA programs?

Our particular project is about analog simulation, though DARPA is also funding surrogate modeling efforts in the digital domain. On analog in particular, one significant impetus is speeding up mixed signal simulations, since digital simulators (in terms of seconds of execution simulated per seconds of simulation time) are much faster than analog simulators, so if you want to do a mixed signal simulation, you're gene…

i've had a lot trouble with analog simulations in SPICE. they often fail to converge or run incredibly slowly. i do a lot of audio circuitry. the speedups addressed here could potentially make it possible to simulate audio circuits in real time. suppose you feed a signal in via an audio interface, pass it through your analog processing circuitry and play it back in real time. the design cycle would be so much faster.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#54

Post by 7_my_mind »

nawgz wrote: post #8
7_my_mind wrote: post #4

Is scientific computing getting some revival with the advent of quantum computers? From what I could see the niche is relatively small and not well paid, with most jobs somehow tied to the public sector. Not sure how Julia factors into all of this. I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately. Very interesting field at the intersection of all my skills, but I'm hesitant to get int…

> I don't think the programming language makes that big of a difference, ultimately I mean, it should be clear Julia is a much higher-performance method of crunching data than Python, which is unquestionably the king of the data science pile, and therefore it factors into performance & cost.

Scientific computing is not done in python. It is usually Fortran on C/C++ or Matlab (which I think uses Fortran libraries behind the scenes). Python is only used for the data manipulation part but not for the core simulation.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#55

Post by JHonaker »

oxinabox wrote: post #21

This seems very promising to me One big part of circuit simulation is solving differential equations. That's the whole inducer, resistor, capacitor thing. Julia has hands down the best toolkit for differential equation solving. Most circuit simulators today are going to be using old methods invented in the 60's-80's. Neglecting the state of the art developments. Someone made a blog post recently comparing the time to…

Not only that, but the LTSpice solution was incorrect, and the Julia solution was correct.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#57

Post by ThJ »

ThJ wrote: post #52
KenoFischer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our particular project is about analog simulation, though DARPA is also funding surrogate modeling efforts in the digital domain. On analog in particular, one significant impetus is speeding up mixed signal simulations, since digital simulators (in terms of seconds of execution simulated per seconds of simulation time) are much faster than analog simulators, so if you want to do a mixed signal simulation, you're gene…

i've had a lot trouble with analog simulations in SPICE. they often fail to converge or run incredibly slowly. i do a lot of audio circuitry. the speedups addressed here could potentially make it possible to simulate audio circuits in real time. suppose you feed a signal in via an audio interface, pass it through your analog processing circuitry and play it back in real time. the design cycle would be so much faster.

speaker frequency response simulations will sometimes use an equivalent electronic circuit. it could help design better speakers. any time you interface digital circuitry with the real world, hybrid circuitry is used. also, with this increased processing capacity, you could be looking at simulating the parasitic properties of components, not just ideal versions of them.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#58

Post by eternauta3k »

oxinabox wrote: post #37

A modern circuit simulator, that has a fully featured programable API, that can be run from a real modern programming language, would be a dream. Every simulator i have used has been pretty limited in that way, or at least those features were not well advertized. Even the insanely expensive ones. I mean the most expensive ones (like $100K liscense type deals, like Cadence) are if anything even less modern from a user…

Have you looked into Spectre's interactive mode? You can send SKILL commands to change parameters and rerun simulations. It's not documented, though.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#59

Post by throwaway9870 »

oxinabox wrote: post #37

A modern circuit simulator, that has a fully featured programable API, that can be run from a real modern programming language, would be a dream. Every simulator i have used has been pretty limited in that way, or at least those features were not well advertized. Even the insanely expensive ones. I mean the most expensive ones (like $100K liscense type deals, like Cadence) are if anything even less modern from a user…

There was a simulator called HSIM that I used 20 years ago to do what you describe. It had a C api that I integrated with. It was more of a fast Spice rather than equivalent to HSPICE or Spectre. I coupled it with a little mini-language I wrote to do easily scriptable regression tests for our system. I believe Synopsys bought the company.

Re: Julia receives DARPA award to accelerate electronics simulation

#60

Post by dnautics »

KenoFischer wrote: post #11

Huh, did not expect our press release to end up on HN, but I'm the PI on this project, so AMA, I guess. Will jump into the questions already asked here and provide some context.

A long long long time ago, I wrote this (currently very unmaintained, and I have no interest in maintaining) julia project, don't know if this is useful to you, but it's pretty clear that there is a LOT of potential for julia in this domain, though if I'm not mistaken, the HDL-stuff is one level above what you're doing in your project -- it would be nice if these sorts of things could be composable: https://github.com/interplanetary-robot/Verilog.jl
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