A COMPARISON OF THE PERFORMANCE OF THE FINITE DIFFERENCE TIME-DOMAIN, FINITE ELEMENT TIME-DOMAIN, AND PLANAR GENERALIZED YEE ALGORITHMS ON HIGH-PERFORMANCE PARALLEL COMPUTERS

摘要

Parallel algorithms for the finite difference time-domain (FDTD), the planar generalized Yee (PGY), and the finite element time-domain (FETD) methods are presented. The FDTD and the PGY algorithms are both explicit time-domain solutions of Maxwell's equations, while the PGY algorithm is based on an unstructured grid. The FETD algorithm is a semi-implicit solution of Maxwell's equations using variational principles, and thus requires a matrix inversion for every time iteration. The three parallel algorithms are based on spatial decompositions of the discrete three-dimensional problem spaces. A comparative analysis of the parallel algorithms is presented based on their memory and computational efficiency as well as their parallel efficiency.