PARALLEL COMPUTATION OF LARGE-SCALE ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD DISTRIBUTIONS

Abstract

Some experience of the use of high-frequency electromagnetics software on parallel computers is reported. Types of such computers are reviewed and approaches to the parallelisation of existing serial software are discussed. A practical large-scale problem is presented involving the modelling in very fine detail of electromagnetic penetration into biological systems. This was tested on state-of-the-art parallel computers and important practical and strategic aspects of the experience derived are discussed. It was found that considerable programmer effort was required to optimise the software to use the computer architecture effectively, but that efficient acceleration of the run-times of typical computational tasks could be achieved, provided that the tasks were large and were partitioned optimally.