Computer Simulation Technology (CST) announces ground-breaking performance enhancement to the market and technology leading CST MICROWAVE STUDIO® (CST MWS) time domain solver. A parallelization based on the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been implemented in version 2009, which enables the solution to extremely large problems by employing computer clusters, thus extending the boundaries of 3D EM simulation.
Design engineers involved in the simulation of very complex and detail rich structures, such as multilayered PCB boards or electrically large structures, will benefit most from CST’s latest development. By decomposing the calculation domain into several parts and distributing these parts to computers in a cluster, the simulation of models with many hundreds of millions of mesh nodes becomes feasible.
CST is working to ensure that the latest hardware developments are available to its customer base at all required levels. Memory limitations on GPU accelerator cards make cluster computing of particular interest when model sizes exceed 96 million mesh nodes. The CST MWS MPI-based parallelization runs on homogenous Windows or Linux clusters.
“Achieving reduced simulation time has always been the main focus of CST, whether by inventing innovative algorithms or through their efficient implementation,” said Peter Thoma, managing director R&D, CST. “With MPI-based parallelization, CST MICROWAVE STUDIO has taken another step forward in helping users to solve what was previously considered to be unsolvable, and within a reasonable time.”
MPI-based parallelization will be available as an option with the CST MICROWAVE STUDIO® v2009 transient solver, Q4 2008.