What is ChileSPICE?

ChileSPICE™ is a shared memory parallel electrical circuit simulation tool that contains many enhanced radiation, time-based, and thermal features and models.

ChileSPICE™ is part of the High Performance Electrical Modeling and Simulation Project (HPEMS), a code development team also involved in The Xyce™ Project, whose goal is to accurately characterize nuclear weapons electrical systems from first principles in all environments over a 50-year lifespan.

HPEMS Project Statement

With the elimination of underground nuclear testing and declining defense budgets, science-based stockpile stewardship requires increased reliance on high performance modeling and simulation of weapon systems. Electrical systems and components are major elements in today’s weapon systems. The present electrical modeling and simulation capabilities are very limited and will be significantly expanded by using massively parallel computational resources. Our vision is to accurately characterize nuclear weapon electrical systems from first principles in all environments over a 50-year lifespan. The goal of this project is to provide the tools that will allow the use of massively parallel modeling and simulation techniques on high performance computers in existing and future nuclear weapon electrical systems models.

The ChileSPICE Project

ChileSPICE™ was created to give Sandia designers a massively parallel circuit simulation tool which they could use immediately during Xyce™ Project's development. ChileSPICE™ contains the same features which will later be implemented in Xyce™ and can perform electrical simulations on complex electrical circuitry with component counts in excess of 40,000 using a shared memory parallel simulation scheme.

Version 1x of ChileSPICE™ was the initial release of the massively parallel circuit simulation software from Sandia National Laboratory. The code is based on the UC Berkeley version Spice3f5 and runs in a manner essentially identical to 3f5. Some major enhancements have been included in ChileSPICE™ including:

These capabilities are accessed through a combination of compile time options (for parallel load & solve) and new commands (for restart and diagnostics). A basic version of the code is generated by typing 'spbuild' in the Spice3f5 directory.