A scalable HPF implementation of a finite‐volume computational electromagnetics application on a CRAY T3E parallel system

Abstract

SUMMARYThe time-dependent Maxwell equations are one of the most important approaches to describing dynamic or wide-band frequency electromagnetic phenomena. A sequential finite-volume, characteristic-based procedure for solving the time-dependent, three-dimensional Maxwell equations has been successfully implemented in Fortran before. Due to its need for a large memory space and high demand on CPU time, it is impossible to test the code for a large array. Hence, it is essential to implement the code on a parallel computing system. In this paper, we discuss an efficient and scalable parallelization of the sequential Fortran time-dependent Maxwell equations solver using High Performance Fortran (HPF). The background to the project, the theory behind the efficiency being achieved, the parallelization methodologies employed and the experimental results obtained on the Cray T3E massively parallel computing system will be described in detail. Experimental runs show that the execution time is reduced drastically through parallel computing. The code is scalable up to 98 processors on the Cray T3E and has a performance similar to that of an MPI implementation. Based on the experimentation carried out in this research, we believe that a high-level parallel programming language such as HPF is a fast, viable and economical approach to parallelizing many existing sequential codes which exhibit a lot of parallelism.