Optimization of Experimental Computational Electromagnetics Code

An ongoing project at the Dept. of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering deals with numeric modeling of electromagnetic properties. The method that is used is entitled the partial element equivalent circuit (PEEC) method and was developed at IBM in the early 70s. The method requires the construction and solution of large linear systems to obtain the wanted quantities (currents and voltages in a structure). The structure of the linear equation system differs for time- and frequency- domain modeling and for full-wave and quasi-static modeling. This require an efficient solver capable of handling all possible systems.

The thesis goal is to (1) determine suitability of existing C++ libraries (PETSc, GMM++, and SuperLU for example) for matrix computations performed in PEEC based modeling, (2) implement a solver in the existing experimental PEEC code, and (3) test the solver against known results.

The programming is performed in C++ under Linux. The thesis does not require extensive knowledge in electromagnetics.