Parallel FDTD electromagnetic effects simulation using on-demand cloud HPC resources

In this paper we report computational benchmarks and scaling results of finite difference time domain solutions of Maxwell's equations for high intensity RF interactions with aircraft using both a local high performance computational cluster and a cluster created out of on-demand commercial systems available from the Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud. We observe good scaling and comparable performance to local HPC clusters. This result implies strong potential for using cloud resources for FDTD problems of interest to electromagnetic effects teams.