An automatic load-balanced parallel multilevel fast multipole method for large scale electromagnetic scattering problem

A parallel multilevel fast multipole method for computing the large scale electromagnetic scattering problem is proposed and implemented in this paper. In recent years, multilevel fast multipole method (MLFMA) has been widely used for analyzing electromagnetic scattering problem of electric large object. In order to extend the range of problem that can be solved using this algorithm, we implement a parallel fast multipole method which can run on the distributed memory computer system. This parallel algorithm is based on the message-passing interface (MPI). A compressed octree based parallel domain subdivision algorithm is used for efficiently avoiding the load balance problem between different CPUs which is caused by the irregular object shape. The parallel efficiency of this algorithm is demonstrated by different computing examples. We have solved electromagnetic scattering problem of many practicality military targets with more than 5,000,000 unknowns using our parallel multilevel fast multipole code on Drawing 4000A Super-Computer at Shanghai Super-Computing Center.