A DISTRIBUTED IMPLEMENTATION OF THE FINITE-DIFFERENCE TIME-DOMAIN (FDTD) METHOD

The finite difference time-domain (FDTD) method is a well known numeri cal technique that has been used to solve electromagnetic boundary val ue problems. However, the method requires large computational resource s to solve a problem, restricting its use on sequential computers to s mall problems. This has led to the use of expensive supercomputers in the past to solve larger problems. In this paper we first discuss exis ting parallel implementations of the FDTD method. We then describe an approach to compute the FDTD equations based on distributed-memory com puter architectures. Finally we evaluate a low-cost parallel implement ation of the FDTD method that runs on a network of workstations, utili zing spare network capacity.