A study of parallel FDTD for simulating complex antennas on a cluster system

The application of the FDTD (finite difference time domain method) to simulate antennas with complex structures presents two problems: consuming huge computer time and requiring enormous memory. Parallel computation is an effective and practical method to deal with those two problems. This paper proposes a parallel FDTD with high parallel efficiency on a cluster system. Using MPI (message passing interface) library, several key aspects involved in the parallel computation of the FDTD are optimized. Results of a numerical example, which simulated a novel "3D fishbone antenna", demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed parallel FDTD. On a cluster system composed of 16 PCs, the parallel FDTD achieved a speed-up and parallel efficiency as high as 5.42 and 90% respectively when 6 PCs were employed in the parallel computation. Even when up to 16 PCs were used, its speed-up and parallel efficiency could be maintained at about 11.69 and 73% respectively.