University of Utah electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student Dian-Lun Lin won second place in the graduate division Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) student research competition at the International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT) 2022. This is one of the largest research-based competitions for students in the parallel computing and processing field.

Lin has been working in assistant professor Tsung-Wei Huang’s lab for the past three years studying parallel and heterogenous computing. He began working on his initial abstract for the competition about a year ago. Following the abstract submission and approval, Lin then competed in two additional rounds where he presented a poster of his research at PACT, then gave a talk at the conference to complete his participation.

Lin’s project, titled “A GPU Acceleration Flow for Parallel RTL Simulation and Hardware Testing,” deals mainly with parallel register-transfer level (RTL) simulation and investigates techniques intended to speed up this RTL simulation.

“RTL simulation is a critical technique in circuit design, but as of now, it is a very time-consuming process. Sometimes thousands of simulations have to be run, which can take hours,” explains Lin. “Initial experimental results of this research are promising and show a significant reduction in runtime of these simulations.”

To learn more about Lin’s award-winning research, click here.

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