Mentor v8.6_4 manual Master and Slave Workstations

Distributed FlexTest

Master

FlexTest

Master

Process

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Slave Slave

Figure 5-1. Master and Slave Workstations

Distributed FlexTest checks for licenses according to the following:

∙Master Process - A master process is required to have a full FlexTest license and a distributed key (another full FlexTest license).

∙Slave Process - A slave process is required to have a full FlexTest license and a distributed key (another full FlexTest license).

Different types of workstations can be used for parallel execution of FlexTest. For example, parallel ATPG may be invoked on a group of machines consisting of HP-UX, Sun Solaris, and IBM AIX machines.

Parallelism during ATPG mode is exploited using the data-parallelism afforded by distributing faults across processes. Due to the differences in the parallel and serial execution environments and due to the non-determinism during parallel execution, some variance in fault coverage and test vector lengths is unavoidable. However, the parallel ATPG implementation tries to minimize such effects. Both static and dynamic load balancing methods are used to equalize run-time loads across machines or processors and thus improve the overall throughput. To assist the load balancing algorithms, you can optionally provide the relative speeds of various machines in the parallel pool.

5-2 FastScan and FlexTest Reference Manual, V8.6_4