Efficient Parallel Finite Difference Time Domain Algorithm for Modeling Electromagnetic Wave Interactions with Dispersive Objects

ABSTRACT: The finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is the most wide spread time domain numerical simulation technique for solving Maxwell equations. The advantages of this method is that it is conceptually simple, and it is simple to be implemented for solving complicated electromagnetic problems. This method, however, is computationally expensive in terms of computational time and memory storage requirement. In this thesis, parallel finite difference time domain (FDTD) algorithm is presented for modeling open region dispersive electromagnetic applications. The algorithm is based on spatial partitioning of the problem geometry into adjacent non-overlapping sub-domains using the two-dimensional topology. The communication among the neighboring processors is carried out by using the message-passing-interface (MРI) library. The performance of the proposed algorithm parallel system, which is composed of (1-16) PCs interconnected through 100Mbps Ethernet, was illustrated for a point source radiating in three-dimensional Lorentz dispersive domain. It has been shown that with eight processors, a speedup factor of 5.6348 is obtained. On the other hand when the problem is distributed among many processors, the speedup decreases. This is because the communication time between neighboring processors becomes comparable to the computation time. Also, it has been found that the algorithm not only speed up the computations but also increases the maximum solvable problem size. Keywords: Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD), Message Passing Interface (MPI), Maxwell equations, Electromagnetic Applications. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………