A New Direction in Computational Electromagnetics: Solving Large Problems Using the Parallel FDTD on the BlueGene/L Supercomputer Providing Teraflop-Level Performance

Abstract

Rapid developments in high-performance supercomputers, with upward of 65,536 processors and 32 terabytes of memory, have dramatically changed the landscape in computational electromagnetics. The IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer are examples. They have recently made it possible to solve extremely large problems efficiently. For instance, they have reduced 52 days of simulation on a single Pentium 4 processor to only about 10 minutes on 4000 processors in a BlueGene/L supercomputer. In this article, we investigate the performance of a parallel Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) code on a large BlueGene/L system. We show that the efficiency of the code is excellent, and can reach up to 90%. The code has been used to simulate a number of electrically large problems, including a 100 * 100 patch antenna array, a 144-element dual- polarized Vivaldi array, a 40-element helical antenna array, and an electronic packaging problem. The results presented serve to demonstrate the efficiency of the parallelization of the code on the BlueGene/L system. In addition, we also introduce the development of the high-performance Beowulf clusters for simulation of electrically large problems.