NPAC Technical Report SCCS-635
Distributed Computational Electromagnetics Systems
Gang Cheng, Kenneth Hawick, Gerald Mortensen, Geoffrey Fox
Submitted August 23 1994
Abstract
We describe our development of a ``real world'' electromagnetic
application on distributed computing systems. A computational
electromagnetics (CEM) simulation for radar cross-section(RCS)
modeling of full scale airborne systems has been ported to three networked
workstation cluster systems: an IBM RS/6000 cluster with Ethernet
connection; a DEC Alpha farm connected by a FDDI-based Gigaswitch; and
an ATM-connected SUN IPXs testbed. We used the ScaLAPACK LU solver
from Oak Ridge National Laboratory/University of Tennessee in our
parallel implementation for solving the dense matrix which forms the
computationally intensive kernel of this application, and we have
adopted BLACS as the message passing interface in all of our code
development to achieve high portability across the three
configurations. The performance data from this work is reported,
together with timing data from other MPP systems on which we have
implemented this application including an Intel iPSC/860 and a CM-5,
and which we include for comparison.