High performance computing for the simulation of thin-film solar cells

To optimize the optical efficiency of silicon thin-film solar cells, the absorption and reflection of sunlight in these solar cells has to be simulated. Since the thickness of the layers of thin-film solar cells is of the size of the wavelength, a rigorous simulation by solving Maxwell's equations is important. However, large geometries of the cells described by atomic force microscope (AFM) data lead to a large computational domain and a large number of grid points in the resulting discretization. To meet the computational amount of such simulations, high performance computing (HPC) is needed. In this paper, we compare different high performance implementations of a software for solving Maxwells equations on different HPC machines. Simulation results for calculating the optical efficiency of thin-film solar cells are presented.