High Performance Computation and Interactive Visualization of Electromagnetics for Engineering Education Programs

This paper introduces a newly developed high performance computation and interactive visualization (HPCIV) system and related techniques for engineering education programs. This HPCIV system can be used to investigate the effectiveness of multiphysics or coupled domain and time domain problems, such as a comb-drive MEMS problem solved by the finite-element method (FEM), and the planar waveguide problem solved by the finite difference-time domain (FD-TD) method. The HPCIV system combines numerical computation and interactive visualization techniques to analyze the engineering problems with multiple users through networks concurrently, but at different locations. Pyramid type data and Lattice type data structures obtained from FEM and FD-TD are used for data transformation and manipulation in the collaborative visualization program. The case study problems present the computational models with different aspects and results analyzed by a group of engineering students across a network or the Internet.