Solution of large electromagnetic problems made feasible by HPC — Reducing execution times from months to hours

Abstract

There are two major advantages of applying High Performance Computing (HPC) to electromagnetic problems. Firstly, to reduce execution times of a given size of problem from days/hours to minutes/seconds. Secondly, the purpose of this paper, to investigate problems, that were so computationally expense, that they were practically “unsolvable”. Pioneering research work in such areas becomes an arduous tedious endeavour. However, HPC now provides the computational power necessary to solve these large electromagnetic problems. Parallel computations of an integral equation technique, in conjunction with a method of moments (MoM) is introduced, in examining electromagnetic illumination of electrically large planar scatterers. To this end, the electromagnetic scattering of an incident wave illuminating an electrically large conducting rectangular plate of infinitesimal thickness is analysed. An integral equation is derived, in terms of the conductivity currents induced on the plate surface, which is solved by employing entire domain Galerkin technique, with Chebyshev type basis functions. The resulting algorithm parallelisation enables extension of the proposed methodology above the resonance region. Numerical results are computed for several scatterer sizes and excitation source types, with impressive near-linear speedups.