A Parallel Multigrid Solver for High Frequency Electromagnetic Field Analyses with Small-scale PC Cluster

Finite element analyses of electromagnetic field are commonly used for designing of various electronic devices. The scale of the analyses becomes larger and larger, therefore, a fast linear solver is needed to solve linear equations arising from the finite element method. Since a multigrid solver is the fastest linear solver for these problems, parallelization of a multigrid solver is a quite useful approach. From the viewpoint of industrial applications, an effective usage of a small-scale PC cluster is important due to initial cost for introducing parallel computers.In this paper, a distributed parallel multigrid solver for a small-scale PC cluster is developed. In high frequency electromagnetic field analyses, a special block Gauss-Seidel smoother is used for the multigrid solver instead of general smoothers such as Gauss-Seidel smoother or Jacobi smoother in order to improve a convergence rate. The block multicolor ordering technique is applied to parallelize the smoother. A numerical exsample shows that a 3.7-fold speed-up in computational time and a 3.0-fold increase in the scale of the analysis were attained when the number of CPU was increased from one to five.