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Spectre: No GPU device found

AB202601143241

Hello,

We are facing problems when trying to get Spectre X GPU simulation / acceleration to work.

The system has an Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 24GB with Turing Architecture which is reported by "nvidia-smi" as well as "deviceQuery". Also Matlab recognizes the gpu and can use it without issues. Thus, the drivers are working fine.

However, when running Spectre X with the +gpu switch, it fails to recognize the card (spectre.out):

Spectre (R) Circuit Simulator
Version 25.1.0.156.isr2 64bit -- 5 Sep 2025
Copyright (C) 1989-2025 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Cadence and Spectre are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All others are the property of their respective holders.

Includes RSA BSAFE(R) Cryptographic or Security Protocol Software from RSA Security, Inc.

User: XXXX   Host: XXXX   HostID: 65786970   PID: 252947

Linux   : Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 9.7 (Plow)
CPU Type: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9800X CPU @ 3.80GHz
        Socket: Processors [Frequency] (Hyperthreaded Processor)
        0:       0 [1200.0] (  8 ),  1 [2998.9] (  9 ),  2 [2209.3] ( 10 )
                 3 [1200.1] ( 11 ),  4 [1200.0] ( 12 ),  5 [1200.0] ( 13 )
                 6 [3699.9] ( 14 ),  7 [2803.5] ( 15 )
        
System load averages (1min, 5min, 15min) : 8.0 %, 4.2 %, 2.6 %
Hyperthreading is enabled
HPC is enabled


Error found by spectre.
    ERROR: No GPU device found


Aggregate audit (4:33:00 PM, Tue Feb 24, 2026):
Time used: CPU = 235 ms, elapsed = 235 ms, util. = 100%.
Peak memory used = 133 Mbytes.
Simulation started at: 4:33:00 PM, Tue Feb 24, 2026, ended at: 4:33:00 PM, Tue Feb 24, 2026, with elapsed time (wall clock): 235 ms.
spectre completes with 1 error, 0 warnings, and 0 notices.
spectre terminated prematurely due to fatal error.

The checkSysConf command passes without issues, the optional nvcc is also found:

...

Validating OPTIONAL-FILE .....1 to check
#   FILE                                    Exists    Status      Info                                   
-   ----                                    ------    ------      ------------                           
1   %PATH%/nvcc                             YES       OPTIONAL                                           
          Status..............: PASS


Validating OPTIONAL command version... 1 to check
          #  Optional command / version  Status
          -  --------------------------  ------
          1  nvcc / V12.8                Found version V13.1.115

...

Normal exit. This workstation (XXXX) status is: PASS
Host XXXX has a Cadence supported Linux configuration.

The article How to run Spectre X GPU-based simulations from Virtuoso ADE and command line suggest that the Turing architecture (Quadro RTX 4000) and even older Pascal architecture (Tesla P100) should be supported.

Is there any further way to debug compatibility of Spectre X with different gpus or check our setup in this regard?

We plan to buy more (recent) hardware and would like to confirm compatibility and performance with gpu processing before that.

Best regards,

Alex Bleitner

  • Andrew Beckett

    Alex,

    I'm not sure that a Turing architecture GPU is suited for Spectre X (it's more specialised for graphics rendering rather than computing), but that's just from a quick google search - I've not done any real checks to be sure. The example in the article is just showing the output, not that it's recommended. The page does mention some of the recommended GPUs, but the best thing to do here is to contact customer support (use the Case menu to submit a case after logging in) so that you can:

    1. Get the latest recommendation for GPUs (typically Nvidia V100, A100, H100, B100/B200)
    2. Whether your simulation is likely to benefit from GPU (there are some recommendations on design size)
    3. Why the GPU is not recognised (I'm assuming you have the GPU enabler license)

    I think you may be at an academic institution (forgive me if I'm wrong), so that might be a challenge. If you're using the Europractice scheme, you may need to go via them for support.

    Please also check with the latest ISR of SPECTRE25.1 - I did see a fix for an issue where a GPU was not being found despite being present, but this was just after the version you're using. Does the "nvidia-smi" command output anything (you might need to install this).

    Note, this is based on not testing anything (I don't have access to a suitable machine right now). Contacting support is the right thing to do here - because then we can have somebody properly check and respond.

    Andrew

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