Department of Informatics Technische Universität München Informatik X: Rechnertechnik und Rechnerorganisation / Parallelrechnerarchitektur Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode , Prof. Dr. Hans Michael Gerndt

In this joint project with Asea Brown Boveri's Corporate Research Center Baden/Switzerland , LINUX based PC clusters connected via a high speed network like the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI), have been utilized for the design of high voltage systems. Particular areas if interest are the simulation of the electrostatic and electromagnetic field distribution in critical regions of transformers, high voltage insulators, or circuit-breakers in order to be able to detect potential constructional  faults during the development process.

For the numeric simulation of the field distribution the so-called Boundary-Element Method has been utilized. In this method, a linear equation system with a fully populated matrix is solved with the iterative GMRES solver. Typical orders of magnitude for the equation system are 10⁴ to 10⁵ unknowns. The algorithm has been parallelized using the Message Passing programming model, particularly using PVM and MPI.
The first parallel versions ran on UNIX workstation clusters or large parallel mainframe computers.

In order to obtain a more economical alternative, the algorithm has been ported to LINUX and implemented on an SCI based PC
cluster.

The advantage of the SCI network over standard Ethernet shows up in particular when simulating electromagnetic fields, since the
solution algorithm is very communication intensive. Measurements on a cluster with 8 nodes already resulted in 1.5 times faster calculations compared to standard Ethernet. It can be assumed that this factor will substantially improve with a higher number of nodes.

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This work is supported by ABB Corporate Research Center Baden/Switzerland.

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