Parallel network coverage simulation application

Over recent years clusters of workstations have begun to rep lac systems of mainframes. This is essentially because of the high performance /cost ratio of these machines for most scientific/industrial applications. Anoth er point is that workstations in industry are often idle at night and over weeks. For comput ationally intensive problems these “farms” can be harnessed to behave as a parall el m chine, and this can be a way to obtain supercomputing performance at modest c ost. Finally, the code developped to run on a cluster of workstations can be also exe cuted on a massively parallel machine only making a new compilation. This paper reports an experiment of such a network within PVM f ramework in the telecommunications field. In TDF-C2R a windows-based oftware has been developped for digital TV network coverage simulation. But simulation is strongly limited for large planning exercices because of computing t ime needed. For example, the exercice over 6400km2 area taking into account more than 60 transmitters inside the area and insidea 300kmmargin around this area takes about 30 hours on a powerful PC. An important speed-up of these computations woud enable :