A. Fijany et al., A MASSIVELY-PARALLEL COMPUTATION STRATEGY FOR FDTD - TIME AND SPACE PARALLELISM APPLIED TO ELECTROMAGNETICS PROBLEMS, IEEE transactions on antennas and propagation, 43(12), 1995, pp. 1441-1449
In this paper, we present a novel strategy for incorporating massive p
arallelism into the solution of Maxwell's equations using finite-diffe
rence time-domain methods. In a departure from previous techniques whe
rein spatial parallelism is used, our approach exploits massive tempor
al parallelism by computing all of the time steps in parallel. Further
more, in contrast to other methods which appear to concentrate on expl
icit schemes such as Yee's algorithm, our strategy uses the implicit C
rank-Nicolson technique which provides superior numerical properties.
We show that the use of temporal parallelism results in algorithms whi
ch offer a massive degree of coarse grain parallelism with minimum com
munication and synchronization requirements. Due to these features, th
e time-parallel algorithms are particularly suitable for implementatio
n on emerging massively parallel multiple instruction-multiple data (M
IMD) architectures. The methodology is applied to a circular cylindric
al configuration, which serves as a testbed problem for the approach,
to demonstrate the massive parallelism that can be exploited. We also
discuss the generalization of the methodology for more complex problem
s.