Towards a Distributed Finite Element Package for electromagnetic field computation

Summary from only given, as follows. The recent evolutions of both hardware and software techniques provide now the possibility to interconnect various computers together, thus allowing them to communicate and to cooperate. On the other side, three dimensional computation of electromagnetic fields with finite elements involves time expensive calculations, and needs the use of various software and hardware tools : parallel computing (and computers), efficient visualization of geometries and results (specialized graphic processors and libraries). This paper presents the transformation of an existing finite element program into a distributed application, allowing its user to dispose of the ´remote´ computational power available on an heterogeneous network of computers. Many difficulties are discussed, such as the localization of resources, the replicated database management, the cost of network communications, and parallel distributed computing.