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I have not read the latest paper, but their previous work was really unclear about metrics being used. Researchers trying to replicate results had a hard time g
by Drunk_Engineer 2y ago
I have not read the latest paper, but their previous work was really unclear about metrics being used. Researchers trying to replicate results had a hard time getting reliable details/benchmarks out of Google. Also, my recollection is that Google did not even compute timing, just wirelength and congestion; i.e. extremely primitive metrics.
Floorplanning/placement/synthesis is a billion dollar industry, so if their approach were really revolutionary they would be selling the technology, not wasting their time writing blog posts about it.
- IshKebab 2y ago> Floorplanning/placement/synthesis is a billion dollar industry Maybe all together, but I don't think automatic placement algorithms are a billion dollar industry. There's so much more to it than that.
- Drunk_Engineer 2y agoYes in combination. Customers generally buy these tools as a package deal. If the placer/floorplanner blows everything else out of the water, then a CAD vendor can upsell a lot of related tools.
- negativeonehalf 2y agoThe original paper reports P&R metrics (WNS, TNS, area, power, wirelength, horizontal congestion, vertical congestion) - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03544-w (no paywall): https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ey204/teaching/ACS/R244_2021_2022/papers/Mirhoseini_NATURE_2021.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ey204/teaching/ACS/R244_2021_2022/...
- Drunk_Engineer 2y agoFrom what I saw in the rebuttal papers, the Google cost-function is wirelength based. You can still get good TNS from that if your timing is very simplistic -- or if you choose your benchmark carefully.
- negativeonehalf 2y agoThey optimize using a fast heuristic based on wirelength, congestion, and density, but they evaluate with full P&R. It is definitely interesting that they get good timing without explicitly including it in their reward function!
- ithkuil 2y agoYeah; it means the heuristic they use is a good one
- gabegobblegoldi 2y agoInteresting == Suspicious? I think this is a big red flag to those in the know.
- clickwiseorange 2y agoThe odd thing is that they don't compute timing in RL, but claim that somehow TNS and WNS improved. Does anyone believe this? With five circuits and three wins, the results are a coin toss.
- sijnapq 2y ago[dead]
- rossjudson 2y agoLike when Google wasted its time writing publicly about Spanner? https://research.google/pubs/spanner-googles-globally-distributed-database-2/ https://research.google/pubs/spanner-googles-globally-distri... or Bigtable? https://research.google/pubs/bigtable-a-distributed-storage-system-for-structured-data/ https://research.google/pubs/bigtable-a-distributed-storage-... or GFS? or MapReduce? or Borg? or...I think you get the idea.
- bushbaba 2y agoSpanner research paper was in 2012. Bigtable was in 2006. GFS 2003. The last decade has been a 'lost decade' of google. Not much innovation to be honest.
- thenoblesunfish 2y agoI am not sure these publications were intended to generate sales of these technologies. My assumption is that they mostly help the company in terms of recruitment. This lets potential employees see cool stuff Google is doing, and see them as an industry leader.
- vlovich123 2y agoSpanner is literally a Google cloud product you can buy ignoring that it underpins a good amount of Google tech internally. The same is true of other stuff. Dismissing it as a recruitment tool indicates you haven’t worked at Google or really know much about their product lines.