Distributed Computational Electromagnetics Systems

We describe our development of a \real world" electromagnetic application on distributed computing systems. A computational electromagnetics (CEM) simulation for radar crosssection(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 con gurations. 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.