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 processors, 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 problems.

       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) 1999-2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

SEE ALSO

       mpb(1), mpb-data(1)

MPB                                              March 13, 2002                                           MPB(1)