Rig P&R Diagram: SpiNNaker place & route diagram generation tools

When working on place and route for SpiNNaker applications it is often useful to generate diagrams of the resulting placements. This library aims to produce attractive and informative placement and routing diagrams from the data types used by Rig's place and route flow.

Here's an example image produced by the tool:

You can get the latest released version of Rig P&R Diagram from PyPi:

$ pip install rig_par_diagram

Commandline Utility

A command-line utility called rig-par-diagram is included with the package which can render diagrams of pickled netlists such as those produced by nengo_spinnaker's nengo_spinnaker.utils.place_and_route.pickle_netlist function. Basic usage looks something like:

$ rig-par-diagram netlist.pcl out.png

See rig-par-diagram --help for more command line options.

The command-line tool expects a picked Python dictionary which has a subset of the following entries:

• "vertices_resources": Chip resources used.
• "nets": Nets in the network.
• "machine": The machine to place/route within.
• "constraints": Placement/routing constraints.
• "placements": A valid set of placements.
• "allocations": A valid set of allocations.
• "routes": A valid set of routes.
• "core_resource": The resource type used to indicate cores in the netlist (defaults to Cores).
• "chip_style": A Rig P&R Diagram Style object.
• "link_style": A Rig P&R Diagram Style object.
• "core_style": A Rig P&R Diagram Style object.
• "net_style": A Rig P&R Diagram Style object.

If vertices_resources or nets are not supplied, the diagram will simply be a picture of the chips, links and cores available in the supplied machine.

If placements, allocations or routes is missing, the default Rig algorithm for each will be used to generate them. This may take some time and so the -v option may comfort users of a nervous disposition.

If a machine isn't supplied, a SpiNN-5 board will be selected by default.

If constraints aren't supplied, a constraint will be added which reserves core 0 as the monitor core. -M disables this.

If any of the *_style options are given, the supplied Style object will be used to style the relevant part of the diagram. See the Diagram module for further details. Unless the -C option is used, cores reserved by constraints will automatically be styled in translucent grey.