RUNNING SUPERNEC ON THE 22 PROCESSOR IBM-SP2 AT SOUTHAMPTON UNIVERSITY

Abstract

SuperNEC (SNEC) is an object-oriented version of NEC-2 which has been modified to execute on a network of distributed memory processors. The matrix filling, solving and pattern computation routines are capable of running in parallel. A number of structures have been simulated using this code on the 22 processor IBM-SP2 machine at Southampton University. The principal problem studied was the DC-3 at 90 MHz. LU decomposition and an iterative matrix solution scheme were used in the study. The simulation time for this structure (which includes 3-D radiation patterns) dropped from 2.5 hours on a single processor to about 17 minutes when simulated on 12 processors using LU decomposition. Execution times are about half of these times when using the iterative solver. The far field patterns obtained from the simulation are compared with measured data and show good agreement. The largest problem tackled on the IBM machine was the DC-3 simulated at 160 MHz. This problem requires 17035 segments and was simulated in 5.3 hours on 21 processors