Feasibility of building a million‑core multithreaded Verilator simulation on a single EC2 instance

Establish whether a multithreaded Verilator build of a one‑million‑core RISC‑V processor array simulator can complete on an AWS EC2 c6a.48xlarge instance and, if so, determine the required build time.

Background

The paper evaluates an alternative to the Switchboard-based distributed approach by attempting to use a single multithreaded Verilator (MT Verilator) simulator for the entire RISC‑V array on a large machine (AWS EC2 c6a.48xlarge with 192 vCPUs). Build time was measured up to an 8,192‑core design, showing roughly linear growth and reaching about half an hour at that scale.

However, the authors note that for a one‑million‑core design, it is not determined whether such a simulator could be built at all on this machine. They provide a rough extrapolation (around 3.1 days) but emphasize the uncertainty, citing another work that reported a 2.9‑day build for a smaller design, suggesting even the extrapolation may be optimistic.