CODE SOLVING THE MAXWELL EQUATIONS IN THE TIME-DOMAIN, IMPLANTED ON DISTRIBUTED-MEMORY TYPE MACHINE

This paper describes the implantation of a code solving the Maxwell eq uations, coupled to a wire model, in the time domain, on a distributed -memory machine. The code uses a finite spatial and time difference sc heme. The various difficulties encountered in parallelizing the code a re explained, and results are presented showing the gain obtained with the parallel implantation on a 64-processor Paragon machine, compared with the vectorial version of the code used on Gray and Alliant proce ssors. Then the performance of the parallel algorithm is described, wh en used on a problem with fixed memory capacity, which is solved by in creasing the number of processors and on a problem to scale i.e. in wh ich the memory capacity increases linearly with the number of processo rs. This provides a way of quantifying the code performance on this ty pe of machine as a function of the problem size, and also the relative importance of communication time versus computation time.