High performance parallel computing for FDTD numerical technique in electromagnetic calculations for SAR distribution inside human head

The interest in high performance computing (HPC) nowadays has increased the need of computational resources to solve large scale problems. The technological improvements over the past few years in areas such as microprocessors, memory, networks, and software, have made it possible to assemble groups of economical personal computers and/or workstations into a cost effective system with high processing power. In this paper, three HPC platforms are utilized and performance is compared to calculate the electromagnetic power absorbed by human head due to radiation from antennas of handheld devices. Parallel processing performance comparison of the three platforms shows that the IBM BlueGene supercomputer still preserves the largest speedup and efficiency. However the cluster and grid computing offer far cheaper solutions for small to moderate size problems beside the more utilization of the already existing computing resources.