Figure of merit for computational electromagnetics solvers

A figure of merit (FoM) is proposed for fair comparison of various computational electromagnetics solvers. This FoM could be formulated in various fashions depending on what is being evaluated and this paper concerns itself primarily with the FE-BI/FMM-FFT type solvers accelerated on multi-core CPUs and GPUs on single-motherboard environments (or PCs). Examples are given for a particular solver and alternative FoMs are also proposed. The data and the conclusions in this paper may or may not be extended to other types of solvers or hardware and this work presented here should be viewed as the start of a much-needed discussion on the topic.