[madengr]

It’s electromagnetic simulation, specifically finite element. You can parallelize some of the math, but mostly not. You can break the structure into smaller sub-domains, but that has issues too. Not much gain beyond 2-4 cores.

[david-gpu]

Not my area of expertise, but I was under the impression that finite element analysis, like other sparse algebra problems, are reasonably well suited for GPUs, which are much more parallel than 2 or 3 cores. Have you looked into that?

[madengr]

The time domain codes work well with GPUs and multiple cores, but the frequency domain ones don’t. I don’t know enough of what’s going on under the hood, but it’s like that for all of them.

[wbl]

I've worked with applied math PDE people and they use supercomputers to full effect. Granted it's a real pain and your cross connect bandwidth matters (hence supercomputer), but you can scale up pretty well.

[mNovak]

I thought FE was mostly memory bandwidth bound?