A Fast Parallel Poisson Solver on Irregular Domains Applied to Beam Dynamic Simulations

We discuss the scalable parallel solution of the Poisson equation within a Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code for the simulation of electron beams in particle accelerators of irregular shape. The problem is discretized by Finite Differences. Depending on the treatment of the Dirichlet boundary the resulting system of equations is symmetric or `mildly' nonsymmetric positive definite. In all cases, the system is solved by the preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm with smoothed aggregation (SA) based algebraic multigrid (AMG) preconditioning. We investigate variants of the implementation of SA-AMG that lead to considerable improvements in the execution times. We demonstrate good scalability of the solver on distributed memory parallel processor with up to 2048 processors. We also compare our SAAMG-PCG solver with an FFT-based solver that is more commonly used for applications in beam dynamics

ParMooN - a modernized program package based on mapped finite elements

{\sc ParMooN} is a program package for the numerical solution of elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations. It inherits the distinct features of its predecessor {\sc MooNMD} \cite{JM04}: strict decoupling of geometry and finite element spaces, implementation of mapped finite elements as their definition can be found in textbooks, and a geometric multigrid preconditioner with the option to use different finite element spaces on different levels of the multigrid hierarchy. After having presented some thoughts about in-house research codes, this paper focuses on aspects of the parallelization for a distributed memory environment, which is the main novelty of {\sc ParMooN}. Numerical studies, performed on compute servers, assess the efficiency of the parallelized geometric multigrid preconditioner in comparison with some parallel solvers that are available in the library {\sc PETSc}. The results of these studies give a first indication whether the cumbersome implementation of the parallelized geometric multigrid method was worthwhile or not.Comment: partly supported by European Union (EU), Horizon 2020, Marie Sk{\l}odowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN-EID), MIMESIS, grant number 67571

Accurate and efficient algorithms for boundary element methods in electromagnetic scattering: a tribute to the work of F. Olyslager

Boundary element methods (BEMs) are an increasingly popular approach to model electromagnetic scattering both by perfect conductors and dielectric objects. Several mathematical, numerical, and computational techniques pullulated from the research into BEMs, enhancing its efficiency and applicability. In designing a viable implementation of the BEM, both theoretical and practical aspects need to be taken into account. Theoretical aspects include the choice of an integral equation for the sought after current densities on the geometry's boundaries and the choice of a discretization strategy (i.e. a finite element space) for this equation. Practical aspects include efficient algorithms to execute the multiplication of the system matrix by a test vector (such as a fast multipole method) and the parallelization of this multiplication algorithm that allows the distribution of the computation and communication requirements between multiple computational nodes. In honor of our former colleague and mentor, F. Olyslager, an overview of the BEMs for large and complex EM problems developed within the Electromagnetics Group at Ghent University is presented. Recent results that ramified from F. Olyslager's scientific endeavors are included in the survey