A Framework for Optimising Parameter Studies on a Cluster Computer by the Example of Micro-system Design

摘要

We present a framework to carry out optimising parameter studies on a cluster environment. The intention of such computation-intensive studies is to find an optimal parameter set concerning a specific objective function. We applied this framework on an example of an optimised design of a sophisticated composed optoelectronic detector. The characteristics of such a detector depend upon 25 different parameters which are input for a FEM program to simulate the detector's behaviour. Depending on the input data the simulation time varies from 10 minutes up to two days for a single simulation. With our framework it was possible to automate the parallel execution of 9000 simulation runs in three days on a 9 node cluster. On a single 2 GHz PC computer all runs would have taken more than one month. As a result we found a structure which improved the detector's former characteristics by a factor of 25.