Efficient algorithm for simulation of the time-domain Maxwell system, An

Abstract

The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method for computational electromagnetics is a versatile family of schemes and provides an efficient framework for the parallel implementation we consider. FDTD is a popular method for computing approximate solutions of the time-domain Maxwell system that may include a variety of heterogeneous material types and network elements. Extensions to the standard FDTD method have enabled the modeling of processes in unbounded domains such as far-field responses. We investigate a FDTD formulation that is capable of handling linear, isotropic, nondispersive, non-hysteretical materials and also consider the implementation of two common useful network elements. We discuss the derivation of absorbing boundary conditions, techniques for obtaining far-field responses, and the inclusion of incident plane waves from distant sources. We compare our simulation results for selected transmission-line, antenna, and scattering problems with theory and previous work. We develop and implement a single-program multiple-data parallel computing scheme for efficient computation of FDTD solutions and provide details of the implementation and overhead of each of the several techniques considered in the thesis. We demonstrate that our parallel implementation provide competitive values for speedup for a class of scattering and far-field simulations. We observed that the scalability of our implementation of the FDTD scheme is in particular efficient for long time simulation of Maxwell systems on large size electromagnetic domains.