Towards a distributed finite element package for electromagnetic field computation

The transformation of a finite-element program into a distributed application, allowing its users to handle the remote computational power available on a heterogeneous network of computers, is presented. Tools are designed to facilitate the client/server decomposition and implementation for a finite-element package like FLUX3D, and it is shown that one can improve the performances of such an application by use of distributed computing. Many difficulties are discussed, such as the localization of resources, the replicated database management, the cost of network communications, and parallel distributed computing. The model in which a single remote server running on a powerful host is used to perform coarse grained computations seems to give the best performances. Because of communication times, parallel distributed computing is less efficient. Moreover, it requires a real programming effort (leading to little transparency) when being implemented in a steady-state finite-element package.<>