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HPC Software for Massively Parallel Simulation of 3D Electromagnetic Nano-structures

Powerful software tools for device simulation and design are essential to advance photonic circuit design. The high fabrication costs of complex photonic nano-devices make it imperative to have access to computational tools based on efficient algorithms, which can greatly accelerate the device design process and reduce the design-fabrication-testing cycle. The OPTIMET code (OPTIcal METa-materials) is based on the multiple-scattering (MSM) formalism for modelling electromagnetic wave interaction with assemblies of particles and material media.

This project will enhance the parallel functionality of OPTIMET by:

  • Extending code capability to 3D geometries.
  • Implementing periodic boundary conditions.
  • Incorporating cubic optical nonlinearities for metamaterials.

On completion of this project the main achievements may be summarised as follows:

  • A new code, OPTIMET-3D was developed to enable simulations for photonic materials with 3D structures. The code also has the capability to model periodic boundary conditions and the effects induced by quadratic optical nonlinearities.
  • OPTIMET-3D has the capability to accurately model the interaction between electromagnetic waves and arbitrary distributions of metallic, dielectric and semiconductor particles.
  • OPTIMET-3D has been ported to the Legion cluster at UCL, and also the InfraGrid and BlueGene/P clusters which are at the West University of Timisoara in Romania.
  • To validate each new area of functionality, the OPTIMET-3D code was demonstrated with three standard test cases. These tests included the single particle sphere, the two particle Dimer and a Cluster of Dielectric Nano-Spheres. An excellent agreement between the calculated and analytical results was demonstrated.
  • Strong scalability of the parallel branch of OPTIMET-3D was demonstrated on the Legion cluster, and for a problem with 12 particles excellent parallel performance was observed for up to 144 MPI processes.
  • Further information on OPTIMET-3D and how to obtain the source code is available here.

Please see PDF or HTML for a report which summarises this project.