A High Performance Parallel FDTD Based on Winsock and Multi-Threading on a PC-Cluster

摘要

Parallel technology is a powerful tool to provide the necessary computing power and memory resources for the FDTD method to simulate electrically-large and complex structures. In this paper, a high performance parallel FDTD is developed for multi-core cluster systems. It employs Winsock to achieve efficient inter-process communication as well as multi-threading to make full use of the hardware resources of multi-core processors on a PC-cluster. Key steps for parallel FDTD such as synchronization, data exchange, load balancing, etc., are investigated. An experiment simulating the scattering of an incident electromagnetic wave form of a computer case is presented which shows that the proposed parallel FDTD achieved speedup of 25.1 and parallel efficiency of 83.7% when 10 processors with 30 cores are utilized, and outperforms traditional parallel FDTD based on MPI or MPI-OpenMP, which gained speedup of 22.9, 24.9 and parallel efficiency of 76.3%, 83.1% respectively under the same circumstances.