Grid Computing and Optical Design

Using Optica and Mathematica 7

Donald Barnhart and Ann Williamson

i-Cyt/Optica Software

This presentation describes the latest features of Optica. Together with Mathematica 7, new solutions have become possible for old problems in optical design. In the first part of our presentation, we describe how Optica works as an authoring tool to generate real-time, user-friendly, demonstrations of optical models that can then be shared and distributed to non-Mathematica/non-Optica users. In second part of our presentation, we discuss our latest innovation in the design of free-form optics, which is becoming a very important topic in solar concentrator research, lighting design, and many other applications. Finally, in the last part, we describe how Optica and Mathematica 7 can be used to solve very large problems in optical design using grid computing. As an example, we apply grid computing to a real-world optical design problem in which we utilize 70 computational cores to calculate a solution over a period of 2 weeks that would have otherwise required three years to compute on a single-processor system.