Boosting the performance of electromagnetic simulations on a PC-cluster

One of the crucial aspects in the design process of high voltage apparatus is the precise simulation of the electrostatic and/or electromagnetic field distribution in 3D domains. This paper summarizes the results obtained on the PC cluster platform installed at ABB Corporate Research using POLOPT a state-of-the-art parallel simulation environment for both electrostatic and electromagnetic problems. The experiments where conducted on a LINUX cluster using both Ethernet and scalable coherent interface (SCI)-based interconnection technologies to allow a study of the impact of high-speed networking technology. For both electrostatic and electromagnetic field simulations in practical high voltage engineering, a high efficiency was obtained in this commodity environment. In addition, the results show that some codes, in this case the electromagnetic solver, are highly sensitive to the communication performance and hence can significantly benefit from the presence of fast interconnection mechanisms, as with the given SCI.