Weak Scalability Analysis of the Distributed-Memory Parallel MLFMA

Abstract

Distributed-memory parallelization of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) relies on the partitioning of the internal data structures of the MLFMA among the local memories of networked machines. For three existing data partitioning schemes (spatial, hybrid and hierarchical partitioning), the weak scalability, i.e., the asymptotic behavior for proportionally increasing problem size and number of parallel processes, is analyzed. It is demonstrated that none of these schemes are weakly scalable. A nontrivial change to the hierarchical scheme is proposed, yielding a parallel MLFMA that does exhibit weak scalability. It is shown that, even for modest problem sizes and a modest number of parallel processes, the memory requirements of the proposed scheme are already significantly lower, compared to existing schemes. Additionally, the proposed scheme is used to perform full-wave simulations of a canonical example, where the number of unknowns and CPU cores are proportionally increased up to more than 200 millions of unknowns and 1024 CPU cores. The time per matrix-vector multiplication for an increasing number of unknowns and CPU cores corresponds very well to the theoretical time complexity.