simpleFDTD

An embeddable 2D electromagnetic FDTD simulation for approximate results in the visible region. Uses the leapfrog alternating-direction implicit FDTD (LADI-FDTD) method.

The goal of this project is to make a simple, user-friendly, and embeddable 2D FDTD simulation using emscripten to compile to WebAssembly. This allows the computation to be run in the user's browser, rather than on the server hosting the page allowing the server to run smoothly and serve simulations even under high load.

To see an example of the generated web page, see here.

Embedding On Your Site:

To use on your site (subject to the license) just download the three files in the website directory and then adjust them as you see fit for your site. It is strongly recommended that you only edit the .html file directly unless you know what you are doing.

Compiling:

To compile, a (perhaps inelegant) combination of make and cmake is used. CMake is used for compiling to executables to run for testing / debugging, while make is used to generate the final .wasm, .html, and .js files.

Specifically, clone the git repo (git clone https://github.com/bcerjan/simpleFDTD) then cd simpleFDTD/c_code, mkdir build, cd build, and cmake ... From there, you can now use make empty or make structure to create executables for testing without compiling all the way to .wasm. Note that if you change any parameters, you need to first run ./empty before compiling make structure as ./structure needs the header files (re)generated by running ./empty.

To make the .wasm (and associated ephemera) enter the c_code directory, and run make. This compiles to WebAssembly. When you edit things, it can be helpful to

1. use make clean_html to remove the previous version of the .wasm, .html, and .js files
2. before running make.