Next-Generation Electromagnetics and Quantum Design Software

Performing accurate simulations of large- and multi-scale electromagnetics problems has far-reaching implications. The same physics governs applications as diverse as wireless propagation in dense urban environments and novel antenna design, both key issues in the pending 5G communications boom; electromagnetic sounding for subsurface exo-terrestrial interrogation; burgeoning RF-based medical imaging modalities; and exploration of intra- and intercellular quasistatic and RF signaling. Many problems, such as those targeted by this work, exhibit a numerically lowrank behavior within blocks of a given system matrix. ButterflyPACK currently supports several low-rank matrix representations that exploit multi-level hierarchical representation of geometry coupling and matrix compression. This is a major advancement over the single-level low-rank structure exploited within current commercial software. This program will extend an already-commercialized electromagnetics software package with multi-level matrix compression technology for single workstations and HPC environments. ButterflyPACK is an ASCR-funded software library providing users with linear algebra routines and system solvers for dense rank-structured linear systems. IERUS proposes a two-fold project for the improvement of our commercial software as well as ButterflyPACK. First, IERUS will incorporate ButterflyPACK into our software and demonstrate multi-level, low-rank matrix compression and solution. Second, IERUS and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) will augment ButterflyPACK to support the full scope of real-world problems that typically break academic libraries. These results will be provided back to the ButterflyPACK project. This work has three major objectives. First, the team will determine areas of improvement for ButterflyPACK to be robust on industry-grade problems. Second, the team will quantify runtime and memory performance of ButterflyPACK algorithms against IERUS’s existing, optimized solvers. Third, the team will demonstrate ButterflyPACK solvers’ accuracy on a wide range of problems for the existing solvers’ target applications, namely electrostatics and electromagnetics. By achieving this objective, the team will have the baseline capability available for extension and performance optimization in Phase II. This new software will provide an important leap in computational capability for all users requiring electromagnetic design and analysis capability. We anticipate these improvements to be particularly useful within the communications, radar, medical, quantum computing, and microwave device communities. These new capabilities will also enable academia, government, and small businesses to obtain high performance results using a simulationas-a-service business model since not all users may have access to large-scale computational resources.