Message-passing-interface-based parallel FDTD investigation on the EM scattering from a 1-D rough sea surface using uniaxial perfectly matched layer absorbing boundary

A message-passing-interface (MPI)-based parallel finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithm for the electromagnetic scattering from a 1-D randomly rough sea surface is presented. The uniaxial perfectly matched layer (UPML) medium is adopted for truncation of FDTD lattices, in which the finite-difference equations can be used for the total computation domain by properly choosing the uniaxial parameters. This makes the parallel FDTD algorithm easier to implement. The parallel performance with different processors is illustrated for one sea surface realization, and the computation time of the parallel FDTD algorithm is dramatically reduced compared to a single-process implementation. Finally, some numerical results are shown, including the back-scattering characteristics of sea surface for different polarization and the bistatic scattering from a sea surface with large incident angle and large wind speed. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America