Analytic solutions Graphics Important modifications Installation and running MMP solver New features PFD solver System requirements
OpenMaXwell is a QuickWin application compiled for Windows XP, Windows Vista. Windows versions older than XP were not tested, but should not provide any problems, provided that the code is compiled with appropriate compilers and compiler options. However, since computational electromagnetics is a demanding task, older Windows versions should not be used.
For running OpenMaXwell under Linux, an interface to the QuickWin graphics routines should be developed in the near future. Meanwhile, you can run OpenMaXwell under Linux using Wine.
Memory is allocated dynamically therefore, the memory requirement depends considerably on the size of problem to be solved. Computational electromagnetics can be very memory intensive, especially when domain methods, such as finite differences are used. For 2D MMP solutions, 32 Mbytes of RAM is almost always sufficient, whereas 3D MMP and finite differences solutions on large grids are much more memory consuming. Note that virtual memory can be used when not enough RAM is available, but this slows down the performance. For large problems, the 64 Bit version of MaX must be applied.
When you solve field problems and want to store the resulting files on your hard disk, you easily can occupy hundreds of Mbytes - especially when you generate advanced animations. Therefore, a hard disk with a capacity of several Gbyte free space is recommended for users who intend to run OpenMaXwell frequently.
For standard projects, all modern Intel and AMD processors are good enough. Currently, multi-core architecture is only used by the QR matrix solver.
The visualization and animation of electromagnetic fields is graphically very demanding. High resolution monitors with fast graphic adapters are recommended, however, any SVGA adapter with 800 times 600 pixels should be sufficient. For the OpenGL graphics window of OpenMaXwell, appropriate graphics drivers that support OpenGL are strongly recommended.
QuickWin supports only 256 colors, 20 of which are reserved by Windows. OpenMaXwell uses all available 236 colors and sets the corresponding color palettes. This might cause problems when you use an old plain VGA adapter. If you normally run in a video mode with more than 256 colors, you can switch to 256 color mode before you run OpenMaXwell when you intend to create long AVI movie files. This helps reducing the AVI file size. Note that the supported OpenGL color modes depend on your system and drivers.
Responsible for this web page: Ch. Hafner, Computational Optics Group, IEF, ETH, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
Last update 17.02.2014