Electromagnetic Simulations via Parallel Computing: an Application Using

Scale Changing Technique for Modeling of Passive Planar Reflectarrays in

Grid Environment


F. Khalil*
(1,2)
, C. J. Barrios-Hernandez
(3,4)
, H. Aubert
(1,2)
, Y. Denneulin
(3)
, F.
Coccetti
(1)
, and R. Plana
(1,5)
(1) LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, France
(2) INPT-ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France
(3) LIG - Monbonnot, Grenoble, France
(4) I3S UNSA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
(5) UPS, Toulouse, France
E-mail: fadi@laas.fr

Introduction

Electromagnetic simulation continues to be the primary method by which
engineers and researchers analyze and design circuits and systems. Nowadays, the
complexification related to the rise of microwaves circuits results in the
coexistence of several scales in the same circuit and in the appearance of
important dimensions ratios. As the dimensions of modern Electromagnetic
circuits continue to shrink, the fabrication and parametric testing of such
structures have become more challenging. Increasing market pressures are driving
engineers and researchers to minimize the time-to-the-market. So more efficient
simulation strategies to accelerate the simulation process are required.
Parallel and distributed simulation approaches seem to be a promising approach in
this direction. With the growing incidence of computer modeling and simulation,
the scope of this paper is to show that parallel simulation of multi-scale models
can achieve several orders of magnitude speedup. When mapped onto distributed
memory multicomputer systems like Computational Grid, additional speedup is
obtained [1].
In this communication a fast computer algorithm based on the Scale Changing
Technique [2, 3] was developed and tested on GRID5000
(https://www.grid5000.fr). The application to the electromagnetic simulation of
an infinite array of passive planar reflectors loaded by one slot is reported. This
array, reported in [4], has been recently simulated by the Scale Changing
Technique without using the Grid environment [5]. The results obtained have
confirmed the effectiveness of such an approach compared to sequential
computing while keeping the same accuracy. Besides, this method seems very
promising in rapid parametric study for convergence studies and for the case of
circuit problems with multiple design parameters to handle.

Proposed Approach

Most of available electromagnetic simulation techniques have been written for
sequential computation and the algorithm constructed to solve the boundary value
978-1-4244-2042-1/08/$25.00 2008 IEEE
problem produces a serial stream of instructions that are executed on a central
processing unit on one computer. Only one instruction may execute at a given
time after that instruction is finished, the next is executed. Parallel computing
uses multiple processing elements simultaneously to solve a problem. The goal is
to parallelize the regions of the sequential code that dominate the runtime. The
problem is broken into parts which are independent so that each processing
element can execute its part of the algorithm simultaneously with others.
Two approaches are possible: (i) an internal one where the sequential code is
modified in order to exhibit parallelism and (ii) an external one where parallelism
is created by executing the same sequential code on various parameters to study
various aspects of the problem at the same time. The performance gain that can be
expected from the (i) is highly dependent on the original code, while the ones
from the (ii) depend on the number of nodes of the parallel architecture as well as
the range of parameters that must be studied. Potential degree of parallelism is
much higher with (ii) than it is with (i).
The processing elements can be diverse and include resources such as a single
computer with multiple processors, a number of networked computers,
specialized hardware or any combination of the above.
A Grid Computing Architecture is a distributed computing environment that
provides a transparent access to software and hardware resources, hiding all the
distribution aspect [6]. Since it is aimed at executing computation intensive tasks,
its design is focused on minimizing overhead. Grid computing is a promising
trend for three reasons: (1) its ability to make more cost-effective use of a given
amount of computer resources, (2) as a way to solve problems that can't be
approached without an enormous amount of computing power, and (3) because it
suggests that the resources of many computers can be cooperatively and perhaps
synergistically harnessed and managed as a collaboration toward a common
objective. In some grid computing systems, the computers may collaborate rather
than being directed by one managing computer. Grid Computing Applications
allows treating large scale problems in science and engineering, it allows the
management of great volume of data and also, it allows exploring new
methodologies to work the complexity. However, the development process of
Grid Computing Solutions shows technical, methodological and scientific
challenges that they are boarded within multidisciplinary points of view.
The Grid computing is used here to run a new and efficient electromagnetic
simulation tool called the Scale Changing Technique [3, 4]. This technique is
based on the cascade of multi-modal Scale Changing Networks, each network
modeling the electromagnetic coupling between two successive scale levels. The
Scale Changing Technique is particularly efficient in the numerical resolution of
boundary value problems involving multi-scale structures and is suitable for
distributed computing.

Performance Evaluation

Application to the electromagnetic simulation of an infinite planar reflectarray
with identical passive unit-cell is now presented and discussed. As displayed in
Figure 1 the unit-cell consists of rectangular metallic patch loaded by a slot [5].
Electromagnetic simulation of the reflectarray for various slot and patch
dimensions is then performed by using the Scale Changing Technique on the
GRID5000 environment.


Fig. 1. Infinite planar reflectarray with identical passive unit-cell composed of a
patch loaded by a slot [4]

The parallel code, based on the sequential one but where potential parallelism has
been exhibited, executed on the Grid shows a remarkable speedup with up to a
43% time reduction while keeping the same accuracy. It is a parallelization of the
internal category where performances gain is often weak because existing
sequential code is often not very parallelizable with strong dependencies between
the blocks of code. A gain of almost 50% on a loosely coupled architecture like a
grid one is so quite remarkable.
The grid computing enables parameterized simulations. A wide range of design
parameters are evaluated in a single analysis run with the goal of exploring the
entire design space and selecting the optimized design without need for the
normal iterative process. Each of the 9 geometry configurations was simulated for
a frequency range going from 11.7 GHz to 12.5 GHz.
The proposed system provides an easy-to-use parametric study that prevents users
from being exposed to the complexity of the trial-and-error procedure, by
distributing the different simulations-run on the grid nodes to be executed
simultaneously. This is the external part of the parallelism of the application and it
enabled us to reach a speedup up to 81 when exploring the design space with 81
nodes. Using these two approaches of parallelization; internal and external, we
were able to solve on a Grid problems that would have been intractable in
sequential in a reasonable time. Since the main gain has been obtained using
external parallelism, our approach can be applied not only to a high performance
Grid like GRID5000 but also to a desktop grid, built out of the idle periods of
desktop computers. The good scaling property of external parallelism is a well
known characteristic we are so hopeful in exploiting with this approach large
scale Grid configurations.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the National Research Agency (ANR) for
support of MEG Project.

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