A Scalable Parallel Wideband MLFMA for Efficient Electromagnetic Simulations on Large Scale Clusters

• Published in: IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation Vol. 59; no. 7; pp. 2565 - 2577
• Main Authors: Melapudi, V., Shanker, B., Seal, S., Aluru, S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.07.2011; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Accelerated Cartesian expansion (ACE); ALGORITHMS; Antennas; Applied classical electromagnetism; Cartesian expansions; Computer simulation; Electromagnetic scattering; Electromagnetic wave propagation, radiowave propagation; Electromagnetism; electron and ion optics; Exact sciences and technology; fast multipole method (FMM); fast solvers; Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications); GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE; IMPLEMENTATION; integral equation (IE); INTEGRAL EQUATIONS; MLFMA; multipole methods; MULTIPOLES; Parallel algorithms; parallel multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA); Partitioning; Partitioning algorithms; Physics; Processors; Program processors; SCATTERING; self-similar tree; Self-similarity; Solvers; Studies; Vegetation; Wideband; wideband MLFMA; Performance evaluation; multipole methods; Scalability; Partition method; Cartesian expansions; Parallel algorithms; Implementation; Wide band; Integral equations; self-similar tree; Fast algorithm; Load balancing; Multilevel system; fast multipole method (FMM); Electromagnetism; fast solvers; Parallel architectures; wideband MLFMA; Selfsimilarity; Simulation; scattering; Multiscale method; parallel multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA); Accelerated Cartesian expansion (ACE); integral equation (IE)
• ISSN: 0018-926X; 1558-2221
• DOI: 10.1109/TAP.2011.2152311

The development of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) and its multiscale variants have enabled the use of integral equation (IE) based solvers to compute scattering from complicated structures. Development of scalable parallel algorithms, to extend the reach of these solvers, has been a topic of intense research for about a decade. In this paper, we present a new algorithm for parallel implementation of IE solver that is augmented with a wideband MLFMA and scalable on large number of processors. The wideband MLFMA employed here, to handle multiscale problems, is a hybrid combination of the accelerated Cartesian expansion (ACE) and the classical MLFMA. The salient feature of the presented parallel algorithm is that it is implicitly load balanced and exhibits higher performance. This is achieved by developing a strategy to partition the MLFMA tree, and hence the associated computations, in a self-similar fashion among the parallel processors. As detailed in the paper, the algorithm employs both spatial and direction partitioning approaches in a flexible manner to ensure scalable performance. Plethora of results are presented here to exhibit the scalability of this algorithm on 512 and more processors.