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

Finite Elements in Analysis and Design, 46(8) (2010), 645-657
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.finel.2010.03.004

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.