Re: NEC-LIST: Beowulf NEC ?

Steve Inge wrote:

>
> Do you know of anyone who is creating a Parallel Virtual Machine
> version of NEC, for use on a Beowulf cluster of PC's?
>

Our SuperNEC program is a parallel version of NEC-2 with added GTD/UTD
and iterative solution techniques (with Matlab GUI, which does not run
in parallel!).

A lot has been added, but SuperNEC can still run like standard NEC-2,
with normal input and output files. The following features all run in
parallel:

- Filling, factoring and solving the matrix
- Near, far field calculations
- Network computations/coupling computations
- Symmetry calculations
- UTD and ray tracing (SuperNEC only)
- Iterative solution also in parallel (Sparse Iterative Method and
  Biconjugate Gradient Stabilized hybrid) + others.

The parallel implementation uses PVM and networked Windows and Unix
machines (can be mixed). The entire program is Object Oriented and
changing to another communication protocol is straight forward (see
the nec-list reference for our ACES paper where SP-2 parallel
implementation was demonstrated, for example). I am not entirely sure
how our PVM cluster differs from a Beowolf cluster - we can also
isolate ours from the rest of our LAN, otherwise seems to be similar.

We also managed to achieve a distributed memory parallel
implementation so that matrix size is limited by the sum of all
machines' memory, rather than limited by some host machine memory.

More information on SuperNEC:

http://www.poynting.co.za/supnec/demo.htm

Some references to this and related work:

http://www.poynting.co.za

and click the "Technical Papers" topic

Regards
Andre Fourie and Derek Nitch
Tel: Intl + 27 11 4030380
Fax: Intl + 27 11 4030381
Website: http://www.poynting.co.za
email: fourie_at_poynting.co.za
Papermail: Dr APC Fourie, PO Box 318, Wits, 2050, South Africa
Received on Mon Apr 26 1999 - 14:25:23 EDT