Parallel simulation of electromagnetic fields for telecommunication applications

The finite difference time domain (FDTD) algorithm has become a popular-technique with which to solve many different electromagnetic problems. However, for real problems the mesh size becomes large and as a result the computation time on a workstation is in the region of tens of hours. In fact, in some cases there will be insufficient memory available on a workstation to solve large problems. We describe a general method based on distributed computing to reduce both the memory requirements and the computation time of the FDTD algorithm. An implementation of the FDTD algorithm on a network of workstations is then evaluated. The implementation is shown to give a peak speed up of 7.5 on a network of 8 workstations over the sequential computation time.<>