UK academic researchers working in the area of photonics have been given a boost with the announcement that Vancouver-based Lumerical Solutions has donated ten FDTD Solutions Engine licenses to ScotGrid.
ScotGrid is collaboration between the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Durham. It is part of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project and GridPP. EGEE is Europe's leading grid computing project, designed to enable high quality computing facilities for a diverse range of disciplines and GridPP provides the high performance computing for UK particle physics research. The donation of Lumerical's FDTD licences will allow scientists to perform large-scale design of devices across a diverse range of applications in biophotonics, display technologies, solar energy, and optical communications, sensing and imaging on one of the largest grid computing facilities in the United Kingdom. The donated Engine licenses allow researchers in the UK using FDTD Solutions to run, at no additional cost, their simulations efficiently on any of ScotGrid's 1,900 processing cores.
Researchers at the University of Glasgow are already generating results more rapidly by using Lumerical's FDTD Solutions in conjunction with ScotGrid. 'A large number of users in our department rely on FDTD Solutions as an integral tool to conduct research in a wide range of fields, including biophotonics, terahertz photonics, and optoelectronics,' says to Dr Marc Sorel, a lecturer in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering. 'As users of FDTD Solutions begin to work on more complicated three-dimensional models, the ability to run large-scale FDTD jobs on ScotGrid has enabled us to accelerate our research efforts.'
The Nano Research Group at the University of Southampton is another group that will be making use of the combined capabilities of FDTD Solutions running on ScotGrid. 'We use FDTD Solutions to explore how optical integrated circuits composed of photonic nanowires and photonic crystal can be applied to various technologies of industrial interest, including optical interconnects, logic switches, sensing, illumination and display technologies,' says Dr Harold Chong, a lecturer in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. 'The potential to run many simulations at the same time on the large computing resources of ScotGrid will have an immense impact on the research productivity of my group.'
