Rigorous solutions of electromagnetic problems involving hundreds of millions of unknowns

Date
2011
Advisor
Instructor
Source Title
IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine
Print ISSN
1045-9243
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
IEEE
Volume
53
Issue
1
Pages
18 - 27
Language
English
Type
Article
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract

Accurate simulations of real-life electromagnetic problems with integral equations require the solution of dense matrix equations involving millions of unknowns. Solutions of these extremely large problems cannot be easily achieved, even when using the most powerul computers with state-of-the-art technology. Hence, many electromagnetic problems in the literature have been solved by resoring to various approximation techniques, without controllable error. In this paper, we present full-wave solutions of scattering problems discretized with hundreds of millions of unknowns by employing a parallel implementation of the Multilevel Fast Multipole Algorithm. Various examples involving canonical and complicated objects, including scatterers larger than 1000λ, are presented, in order to demonstrate the feasibility of accurately solving large-scale problems on relatively inexpensive computing platforms.

Course
Other identifiers
Book Title
Keywords
Electromagnetic fields, Electromagnetic scattering, Integral equations, Iterative methods, Multilevel fast multipole algorithm, Parallel algorithms
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)