University of Technology Sydney Facilities

Computational modelling is integral to the research programs of CUDOS and comprises both the development of new tools, and the use of software systems that are in wide used in the photonics industry. In contemporary photonics research, 3D simulation is now mandatory, with actual design work requiring the simulation of real 3D systems in order to accurately characterise device performance. By its very nature, 3D modelling is very demanding and requires the use of large memory, parallel computer systems. While there are a numerous simulation tools in use in the industry, finite difference time domain (FDTD) codes are now in universal use, with these now regarded as the pre-eminent general purpose simulation tool in photonics and related areas, in which direct simulation of the electromagnetic field is required. With a FDTD code, the system response is determined by numerically integrating Maxwell’s equations in both space and time, allowing a pulse or continuous wave to be evolved and analysed in any device geometry.

In CUDOS, FDTD simulation is undertaken on both PC workstations and with a dedicated parallel computing Linux Cluster which has been acquired by UTS with CUDOS funds. Our facility, which is co-located at ac3 (Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications), comprises 32 Dell 1750 compute nodes (each with dual Intel Xeon processors running at 3.06 GHz and having 2Gbytes of memory) which are embedded within the large 187 node Linux cluster (acquired previously with ARC LIEF funds)—one of the major high performance computing (HPC) systems operated by ac3 for the NSW university research community. The cluster runs a parallelised version of the RSoft FullWAVE FDTD software (compatible with that which runs on workstations) as well as a number of locally written codes, and is used by both Sydney and UTS node researchers.

The rapidly growing need for 3D simulation has led to workloads which have saturated the present facility and the current software licenses. Access to additional processing power will be available though ac3 with the installation of a new “capability” HPC system in 2006 as a consequence of a successful application for ARC LIEF funding, led on behalf of the NSW research community by Lindsay Botten. At the time of writing opportunities to increase the number of FDTD software licences available to the CUDOS community are being investigated.

The entire Dell Linux cluster located at ac3, with the dedicated CUDOS facility occupying one full rack.