Muroran Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Muroran
In addition to standard high performance computing technologies such as supercomputers and grid computers, a method of dedicated computers have been attempted to construct portable high performance computing environments in the vicinity of office PC. The method of dedicated computers have also been adopted into electromagnetic field simulations, which are mainly in a linear algebra equation solver for general electromagnetic field analysis and the FDTD solver for microwave simulations. In this paper, attempts of FDTD/FIT dedicated computer (FDTD/FIT machine) are introduced*. The basic scheme of the FDTD/FIT method itself is very simple and suitable for implementation as hardware circuits. In addition, it is also essential to realize many other functions such as imposing of boundary conditions, treatment of non-uniform materials, power input, etc. Moreover, to fully bring out the advantage of the method of dedicated computer, the computer architecture should be designed to achieve efficient computing of all of FDTD/FIT scheme including the boundary condition setting, etc. Especially various efforts of minimization of memory access overhead are discussed in this paper.
