A Scalable Parallel Fast Multipole Method for Analysis of Scattering from Perfect Electrically Conducting Surfaces

In this paper, we develop a parallel Fast Multipole Method (FMM) based solution for computing the scattered electromagnetic fields from a Perfect Electrically Conducting (PEC) surface. The main contributions of this work are the development of parallel algorithms with the following characteristics: 1) provably efficient worst-case run-time irrespective of the shape of the scatterer, 2) communication-efficiency, and 3) guaranteed load balancing within a small constant factor. We have developed a scalable, parallel code and validated it against surfaces for which solution can be computed analytically, and against serial software. The efficiency and scalability of the code is demonstrated with experimental results on an IBM xSeries cluster. Though developed in the context of this particular application, our algorithms can be used in other applications involving parallel FMM.