Innovations continue to emerge from Amazon Web Services’ Center for Quantum Computing (AWS CQC), the latest coming this week in the form of Palace PArallel, LArge-scale Computational Electromagnetics), a 3D parallel finite element solver for full-wave computational electromagnetics simulations.
Palace is named for PArallel, LArge-scale Computational Electromagnetics. AWS announced its release this week as a free open-source project on GitHub “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 company said in a blog post.
The solver currently is used at AWS CQC to perform large-scale 3D simulations of complex electromagnetics models, and to enable the design of quantum computing hardware. It is not surprising to also hear that the cloud giant built Palace with support for the scalability and elasticity of the cloud in mind and to leverage AWS’ cloud-based high-performance computing (HPC) products and services.
The blog post stated that AWS created Palace to help scientists and engineers avoid having to make compromises between model fidelity, wall-clock time, and computing resources…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-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances using customized Intel processors or AWS Graviton processors for superior price-performance.”
The post added that the software can help users “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 there exist many highly performant, open-source tools 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.
The AWS Center for Quantum Computing is focused on research related to the long-term evolution of quantum computing and is part of a trio of programs at AWS focused on quantum developments, with the other two being the AWS Quantum Solutions Lab and the Center for Quantum Networking.
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.