[Beowulf-announce] MPB 1.0: parallel computation of electromagnetic eigenmodes

[Steven G. Johnson]

I am pleased to announce release 1.0 of the MIT Photonic-Bands (MPB)
package, a free program to compute electromagnetic eigenmodes and
dispersion relations of arbitrary periodic dielectric structures.  This is
the first version to support parallel machines with MPI, and is available
from:

		http://ab-initio.mit.edu/mpb/

MPB was especially designed for the study of photonic crystals (photonic
band-gap materials), but is also well suited for other optical problems,
including waveguides and resonant cavities.  Its features include:
fully-vectorial computations, a flexible scripting interface using GNU
Guile, fast iterative eigensolver methods, support for anisotropic and
magneto-optic materials in arbitrary geometries, and field output in HDF5
format.

The parallel code was primarily tested on an SGI Origin2000, where
excellent scaling has been observed even for relatively small problems, but
it has also been tested under Linux with MPICH.  It should run on any
Beowulf cluster, although a fast communications architecture (i.e. not fast
ethernet) is probably required for good performance.

Cordially,
Steven G. Johnson