Investigation on 3-D implicit FDTD method for parallel processing

Abstract

The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is the well-known method to solve three-dimensional (3-D) electromagnetic problems. However, it contains numerical instability because it is a complete explicit method, and huge memory is required in the case of 3-D analysis. In this paper, the implicit FDTD method called the alternating implicit block overlapped (AIBO)-FDTD method is applied to a 3-D electromagnetic analysis. This method is numerically stable since the implicit scheme is included, and it is suitable for parallel processing since the computational domain can be effectively partitioned. This property is especially compatible with implementations using distributed-memory multiprocessor systems such as PC clusters, which provide a huge memory space that accommodate a large problem. Our results show that parallel processing is an effective technique for improving the performance of the 3-D AIBO-FDTD method, while this method is slower than FDTD when it is run on one processor.