PARTS — Electromagnetic Simulations with Fast Boundary Element Methods using HPC

TAILSIT is a company based in Graz, Austria, that produces custom-fit simulation software tools for computational electromagnetics and structural analysis. Its unique selling proposition is a numerical software library based on a coupled Finite/Boundary Element Method (FEM/BEM) for the efficient analysis of electromagnetic problems. A major building block of the software is represented by the BEM which, in its naive implementation, has a quadratic complexity: runtime and memory requirements scale with the second power of the system size. In order to overcome this limitation, TAILSIT uses the Fast Multipole Method (FMM) where the scaling of the computational costs reduce to almost linear complexity. But even with this acceleration technique, the use of the BEM is rather limited on an average desktop workstation. During this SHAPE project TAILSIT’s electromagnetic simulation software has been ported to HPC machines with the support of the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC, https://vsc.ac.at) at TU Wien and using their computing resources. Thorough performance analyses have led to significant runtime improvements and a good overall scaling for up to a few thousand CPUs. Whereas TAILSIT’s previous implementation of the FMM could handle about 106 degrees of freedom, within this project we achieved problem sizes of up to 50 · 10.