Parallelization of BEM Electrostatic Solver Using a PC Cluster

H-K Tang and Y-J Yang
National Taiwan University, TW

Keywords: pre-conditioner, PC cluster, BEM, fast multipole method, parallelization, MPI

Abstract:
In this paper, the application of parallel-processing techniques for electrostatic calculation is presented. Evaluating the pre-conditioner used for inverting the system matrix of a boundary-element-method (BEM) electrostatic solver (Fastlap) is one of the most time consuming steps during the whole computation process. Therefore, we apply parallelization techniques to accelerate this step using a PC cluster, with minimum modification on the original source code. The basic idea is to parallelize the inversions of the sub-matrices which are extracted from the original system matrices. Then the inverted sub-matrices will be assembled into the pre-conditioner. The efficiency of the parallelization is also compared between different methods of distributing sub-matrices for inverting. The preliminary results for a testing sphere structure show that the computing time can be effectively reduced using the parallel processing without any compromise in accuracy. The speed-up is close to 4 by using a four-node cluster.

Nanotech 2004 Conference Technical Program Abstract