Parallelize UVM tests without LSF (in CI)

[imphil]

RISC-V DV gives us the option to specify a job submission command to parallelize simulation jobs. We do not have a full LSF setup, and I don't really want to build one for CI.

I see two options:

• Find a small tool which we can use as job submission command, similar to bsub -Is (which is what the RISCV-DV documentation suggests).
• Parallelize on the dv/uvm/core_ibex/Makefile level
• Manually split up the tests and run them in parallel through Azure Pipelines jobs, i.e. run make TEST=test_1, make TEST=test_2, etc. in parallel.

I think I'd prefer Option 1. I did have a quick look at GNU parallel and I'm not sure it's up to the job, but I'm quite sure there must be something out there.

[rswarbrick]

I suggest that we make a small change to the riscv-dv code to allow job-array-style submission. That will be much more efficient with LSF too.

Then we can use GNU parallel or even xargs -P (which avoids all the --will-cite nonsense) in non-enterprise environments :-)

[bekbeis]

Hi @imphil @rswarbrick,

I was wondering if you've found an option to parallelize UVM tests without using LSF.

I ran the tests locally on my machine, and it took 4313 minutes (almost 3 days) to complete. Is this normal behavior when running on a single machine? Is there any benefit to using LSF (as suggested in the documentation) on a single machine to speed up the execution of the testbench?

I would appreciate any recommendations on optimizing/speeding up the process.

Thank you in advance for any guidance you can provide.