Efficient Parallelization of Electromagnetic Field Computations on a Beowulf Cluster

摘要

In this paper, efficient high performance computation of electromagnetic field problems using a Beowulf cluster and MatLab® is presented. A cluster with one master node, eight identical computing nodes, and a Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch is firstly built. An open source Rocks toolkit solution is used to simplify the process of deploying high-performance parallel computing clusters. Then, three computational electromagnetic applications are developed and implemented on the cluster using parallel MatLab. In the first application, is calculated the input impedance of a multilayer multiconductor circular microstrip antenna that is excited with coaxial probe and operating in a wide frequency band. Parallelization is then performed over the frequency vector permitting a speedup ratio of 23. In the second application, is presented a systematic method for generating and computing symbolic expressions of 3D tetrahedral FEM basis functions of higher orders up to 10. The final application is dedicated to the parallelization of the spatial moment method code for 2D array of bowtie antenna. The simulation results have shown that the array size can be increased considerably leading to a linear system with a size up to 100 times greater than the one under study.