Researchers at Amazon Web Services (AWS) have introduced a new software framework that can be used to create electromagnetic simulations on quantum computing hardware. PArallel, LArge-scale Computational Electromagnetics, (Palace) is a parallel finite element code designed for full-wave electromagnetics simulations.
Palace is used at the AWS Center for Quantum Computing to perform large-scale 3D simulations of complex electromagnetics models and enable the design of quantum computing hardware. The researchers developed this to leverage the cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) products and services available on AWS.
The software has now been made freely available on GitHub as an open-source project for electromagnetic modeling workloads, not limited to those in quantum computing, which users can run on systems ranging from their own laptops to supercomputers.
The blog post on the Amazon website reports, "Palace uses scalable algorithms and implementations from the scientific computing community and supports recent advancements in computational infrastructure to deliver state-of-the-art performance. On AWS, this includes the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for fast networking and HPC-optimised Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances using customised Intel processors or AWS Graviton processors for superior price performance. Open-source software like Palace also allows users to exploit elastic cloud-based HPC to perform arbitrary numbers of simulations in parallel when exploring large parametric design spaces, unconstrained by proprietary software licensing models.”
“Lastly, we built Palace because while many highly performant, open-source tools exist for a wide range of applications in computational physics, there are few open-source solutions for massively parallel, finite element-based computational electromagnetics. Palace supports a wide range of simulation types: eigenmode analysis, driven simulations in the frequency and time domains, and electrostatic and magnetostatic simulations for lumped parameter extraction. As an open-source project, it is also fully extensible by developers looking to add new features for problems of industrial relevance. Much of Palace is made possible by the MFEM finite element discretisation library, which enables high-performance, scalable finite element research and application development.”
The full story is available on the AWS blog.
