Numerical Simulation of a GaAs MESFET Device using Parallel Processing Techniques with Adaptive Meshing and Dynamic Load Balancing on a Transputer Network

A parallel implementation of the numerical simulation of a GaAs MESFET device using the finite difference discretisation scheme and solved by a point iterative method is presented. Parallel techniques targeted at Multiple-Instructions Multiple-Data (MIMD) message-passing distributed memory architectures, in particular, Transputers, are described. Efficient parallelism is achieved by the geometric decomposition of the problem domain. Issues on the convergence and efficiency of the solution with novel strategies such as iteration ordering techniques and communication protocols in a parallel environment are discussed. The parallel implementation of the adaptive grid refinement also requires load balancing techniques for optimum efficiency. Performance results of the parallel simulation using these techniques are presented.