Software and Computing

Simulation and Design Software

Antenna Group staff and students have access to a range of in-house developed antenna design software, including various "flavours" of FDTD, as well as commercial CAD/CEM and CAD/CAM software, including (all external links to the software vendors):

• Keysight ADS (temporarily unavailable)
• Ansys HFSS (temporarily unavailable)
• FEKO (part of Altair HyperWorks Suite)
• CST – Microwave Studio
• Cadence AWR
• WinProp (now part of Altair FEKO in HyperWorks Suite)
• COMSOL Multiphysics
• Altair Hyperworks IoT Products
• Altair HyperWorks Suite
• MATLAB
• National Instruments: Multisim & Ultiboard
• National Instruments: LabView
• GRASP 8.0
• Zemax Optical Studio
• Autodesk Inventor 11
• Mastercam X2 (discontinued)
• CircuitCAM Board Master

Computing Resources

The Group have two computational clusters for solving large electromagnetic problems with commercial solvers and to support the development of the in-house computational electromagnetics software. These are:

• A small test-bed cluster for code development (512 GB of RAM and 128 cores at 2 GHz); this is largely used for special developments and is not generally available, as its been superseded by the "Large Cluster" for general use by all Antenna Group members (currently 3584 GB of RAM and 224 cores at 2.2 GHz).
• The larger cluster includes a "fat" Windows node with 512 GB of RAM and 32 cores at 2.2 GHz, and 12 compute nodes with 3072 GB of RAM and 192 cores at 2.2 GHz. The Windows node supports all commercial software above. The cluster currently supports COMSOL, CST, MATLAB and MPI-based custom code. Staff and students can find more information on using the clusters on the intranet (requires login), as well as pages for monitoring jobs (also requires login).

Shared access to the MidPlus consortium cluster, currently consisting of 9.2 TB of RAM and 2328 cores at 2.4 GHz and hosted by QMUL, is also available.