Parallelizing a Hybrid Finite Element-Boundary Integral Method for the Analysis of Scattering and Radiation of Electromagnetic Waves Articles uri icon

publication date

  • August 2010

start page

  • 645

end page

  • 657

issue

  • 8

volume

  • 48

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0168-874X

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1872-6925

abstract

  • This paper presents the practical experience of parallelizing a simulator of general scattering and radiation electromagnetic problems. The simulator stems from an existing sequential simulator in the
    frequency domain, which is based on a finite element analysis. After the
    analysis of a test case, two steps were carried out: first, a
    "hand-crafted" code parallelization of a convolution-type operation was
    developed within the kernel of the simulator. Second, the sequential HSL
    library, used in the existing simulator, was replaced by the parallel
    MUMPS (MUltifrontal Massively Parallel sparse direct Solver) library in
    order to solve the associated linear algebra problem in parallel. Such a
    library allows for the distribution of the factorized matrix and some
    of the computational load among the available processors. A test problem
    and three realistic (in terms of the number of unknowns) cases have
    been run using the parallelized version of the code, and the results are
    presented and discussed focusing on the memory usage and achieved
    speed-up.