The previously described commands can be used independently, or called from the ppart program in the case of a distributed synthesis.
ppart has been developped using PVM [] for parallel synthesis based on SIS. The master process spawns SIS tasks corresponding either to partitioning or synthesis tasks. The partitioning command splits the network into subnetworks available as data files. Synthesis tasks are spawned with the accurate SIS script on these files. The master/slave paradigm also allows us to mix distributed phases and global optimization on a single processor. The software works on a network of workstations or on a Paragon parallel computer.
Distributed synthesis is specified as a pscript corresponding to a sequence of phases, involving one or more processors. The master/slave paradigm used allows large flexibility in the definition of the sequential/parallel execution of the synthesis. However, because of communication costs over NFS, the system is intended to manage coarse-grain tasks.