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 BlueGenefL 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 dualpolarized 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. © 2008 IEEE.