OPTIMIZATION ISSUES IN FINITE ELEMENT CODES FOR SOLVING OPEN DOMAIN 3D ELECTROMAGNETIC SCATTERING AND CONFORMAL ANTENNA PROBLEMS.

The first part of the paper presents the implementation and performance of a new absorbing boundary condition (ABC) for truncating finite element meshes. This ABC can be applied conformally to the surface of the structure for scattering and antenna radiation calculations. Consequently, the computational domain is reduced dramatically, thus allowing the simulation of much larger structures, and results are presented for three-dimensional bodies. The latter part of the paper discusses optimization issues relating to the solver's CPU speed on parallel and vector processors. It is shown that a jagged diagonal storage scheme leads to a four-fold increase in the FLOP rate of the code, and a standard matrix profile reduction algorithm substantially reduces the inter-processor communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]