PORTING A 3-DIMENSIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR-DEVICE MODELING PROGRAM TO THE INTEL IPSC 860 HYPERCUBE/

EVEREST is a three-dimensional device modelling package used to study the electrical behaviour of semiconductor devices. A set of partial di fferential equations describing the current flow within the device is solved using a mixed mesh of tetrahedral and hexahedral elements. The highly non-linear nature of the equations requires that a flexible sol ution strategy be used to make the software robust and efficient. With in the solution process large sparse non-symmetric linear systems are solved using iterative solvers such as CGS with preconditioning. Run t imes of many hours or even days are required for realistic devices on current workstations. EVEREST consists of over 100 000 lines of Fortra n and was developed for scalar architectures. The main aim of this wor k was to investigate how such an application could be adapted to run o n the iPSC/860. A review of some of the possible parallelisation techn iques is made. Most techniques for the parallel implementation of such mesh based calculations on MIMD machines involve a partitioning of th e mesh. An extension of an algorithm due to Farhat has been implemente d in a pre-processor to partition the device meshes used by EVEREST. A spects of load balancing and the need to minimise the number of interf ace nodes in the decomposition are discussed. Some initial results usi ng the partitioned mesh to perform the system matrix assembly are pres ented. Methods that could be used to implement a parallel precondition ed CGS solver on the iPSC/860 are reviewed and some performance estima tes made using the results of certain BBS tests on this machine.