Hardware Accelerated Simulator for Scattering from Electrically Large Objects and Scenes

Identifying a means of accurately simulating the scattering and radiation from large objects and scenes in a reasonable timeframe has been an active area of research for decades. Traditionally, addressing this problem has required either trading accuracy and flexibility for performance or running simulations on massive platforms such as supercomputers. Due to lingering limitations, these approaches are still limited the size and scope of the problems that can be addressed. EM Photonics proposes an alternative, the use of reconfigurable computing to run these large simulations without compromising accuracy or requiring the purchase of expensive, high-maintenance equipment. EM Photonics has successfully applied this approach to the finite-difference time-domain algorithm for simulating electromagnetic wave propagation in time. The proposed effort is intended to build on this work by implementing an accelerated method of moments (MoM) solver. The anticipated result is a desktop computer that is capable of running scattering simulations at speeds beyond that of a 100-node Beowulf cluster. This will enable not only the simulation of large problems in a reasonable timeframe but, due to the size and cost of the resulting product, allow the technology to reach the hands of more engineers.