Palace: 3D Finite Element Solver for Computational Electromagnetics

Palace, for PArallel LArge-scale Computational Electromagnetics, is an open-source, parallel finite element code for full-wave 3D electromagnetic simulations in the frequency or time domain, using the MFEM finite element discretization library and libCEED library for efficient exascale discretizations.

Key features

• Eigenmode calculations with optional material or radiative loss including lumped impedance boundaries. Automatic postprocessing of energy-participation ratios (EPRs) for circuit quantization and interface or bulk participation ratios for predicting dielectric loss.
• Frequency domain driven simulations with surface current excitation and lumped or numeric wave port boundaries. Wideband frequency response calculation using uniform frequency space sampling or an adaptive fast frequency sweep algorithm.
• Explicit or fully-implicit time domain solver for transient electromagnetic analysis.
• Lumped capacitance and inductance matrix extraction via electrostatic and magnetostatic problem formulations.
• Support for a wide range of mesh file formats for structured and unstructured meshes, with built-in uniform or region-based parallel mesh refinement.
• Solution-based Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) for all simulation types aside from transient. Nonconformal refinement is supported for all mesh types, and conformal refinement for simplex meshes.
• Arbitrary high-order finite element spaces and curvilinear mesh support thanks to the MFEM library.
• Scalable algorithms for the solution of linear systems of equations, including matrix-free $p$-multigrid utilizing high-order operator partial assembly, parallel sparse direct solvers, and algebraic multigrid (AMG) preconditioners, for fast performance on platforms ranging from laptops to HPC systems.
• Support for hardware acceleration using NVIDIA or AMD GPUs, including multi-GPU parallelism, using pure CUDA and HIP code as well as MAGMA and other libraries.

Contents

• Installation
• Execution
• User Guide
• Configuration File
• Examples
• Reference
• Developer Notes

Coming soon

• Improved adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) support for transient simulations and numeric wave ports on nonconformal meshes
• Perfectly matched layer (PML) boundaries
• Periodic boundaries with phase delay constraints
• Automatic mesh generation and optimization