Light scattering simulations on a massively parallel computer at the IC3A

The Coupled Dipole method, as originally formulated by Purcell and Pennypacker, is a very powerfull method to simulate the Elastic Light Scattering from arbitrary particles. This method however has onemajor drawback: if the size of the particles grows, or if scattering from an ensemble of randomly oriented particles has to be simulated, the computational demands of the Coupled Dipole method soon become too high. In this paper we present a new computational technique to solve this problem. We have implemented the Coupled Dipole method on a Massively Parallel Computer in our Interdisciplinary Center for Computer based Complex systenm research in Amsterdam. The parallel efficiency is close to one, implying that attained computational speed scales perfectly with the number of processors.