Parallel FDTD solver with static and dynamic load balancing

Abstract

Finite-difference time-domain method (FDTD) is widely used for modeling of computational electrodynamics by numerically solving Maxwell’s equations and finding approximate solution at each time step. Overall computational time of FDTD solvers could become significant when large numerical grids are used. Parallel FDTD solvers usually help with reduction of overall computational time, however, the problem of load balancing arises on parallel computational systems. Load balancing of FDTD algorithm for homogeneous computational systems could be performed statically, before computations. In this article static and dynamic load balancing of FDTD algorithm for heterogeneous computational systems is described. Dynamic load balancing allows to redistribute grid points between computational nodes and effectively manage computational resources during process of computations for arbitrary computational system. Dynamic load balancing could be turned into static, if data required for balancing was gathered during previous computations. Measurements for presented algorithms are provided for IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer and Tesla CMC server. Further directions for optimizations are also discussed.