Parallel hardware and software implementations for electromagnetic computations

Abstract

Multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) is an accurate frequencydomain electromagnetics solver that reduces the computational complexity and memory requirement significantly. Despite the advantages of the MLFMA, the maximum size of an electromagnetic problem that can be solved on a single processor computer is still limited by the hardware resources of the system, i.e., memory and processor speed. In order to go beyond the hardware limitations of single processor systems, parallelization of the MLFMA, which is not a trivial task, is suggested. This process requires the parallel implementations of both hardware and software. For this purpose, we constructed our own parallel computer clusters and parallelized our MLFMA program by using message-passing paradigm to solve electromagnetics problems. In order to balance the work load and memory requirement over the processors of multiprocessors systems, efficient load balancing techniques and algorithms are included in this parallel code. As a result, we can solve large-scale electromagnetics problems accurately and rapidly with parallel MLFMA solver on parallel clusters.