MPB(1)							    MIT Photonic-Bands Package							    MPB(1)

NAME

       mpb-split - compute eigenmodes with MPB using multiple processes

SYNOPSIS

       mpb-split NUM-SPLIT [DEFINITION]... [CTLFILE]...

DESCRIPTION

       mpb-split  is  a  parallelizing	front-end  to  MIT Photonic Bands (MPB).  For a computation with several k points, it splits the list of k
       points over multiple processes.	Of course, this will only benefit you on a system where different processes will run on different  proces-
       sors,  such  as an SMP or a cluster with automatic process migration (e.g. MOSIX). mpb-split is actually a trivial shell script, though, so
       you can easily modify it if you need to use a special command to launch processes on other processors/machines.

       MIT Photonic Bands (MPB) is a free program to compute the band structures (dispersion relations)  and  electromagnetic  modes  of  periodic
       dielectric  structures,	and  is applicable both to photonic crystals (photonic band-gap materials) and a wide range of other optical prob-
       lems.

       More information on MPB, including a detailed manual, can be found online at the MPB home page: http://ab-initio.mit.edu/mpb/

       A typical invocation of mpb-split looks like:

	   mpb-split num-split foo.ctl >& foo.out

       This causes mpb-split to process the control file foo.ctl, divide the k points into num-split equal chunks, run each  list  in  a  separate
       process	with  MPB, and redirect the output (in order) to foo.out.  (One typically redirects output to a file, as the output is verbose and
       contains a number of comma-delimited datasets that one can extract by grepping.)

       Overall, the behavior and arguments are the same as for mpb except that the first argument must be the integer num-split.

       What mpb-split technically does is to set the MPB variable k-split-num to num-split and k-split-index to the index (starting with 0) of the
       chunk  for  each  process. If you want, you can use these variables to divide the problem in some other way and then reset them to 1 and 0,
       respectively.

BUGS

       Send bug reports to S. G. Johnson, stevenj@alum.mit.edu.

AUTHORS

       Written by Steven G. Johnson.  Copyright (c) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

SEE ALSO

       mpb(1), mpb-data(1)

MPB
								  March 13, 2002							    MPB(1)