A key aspect in the design process of high voltage gear is the exact simulation of the electrostatic and/or electromagnetic field distribution for three dimensional problems. However, such simulation runs are quite compute- and communication-intensive. Therefore, clusters of commodity PCs, equipped with high-speed interconnection technologies, are becoming increasingly important as target platforms, due to their excellent cost-performance ratio.

This paper gives a status report on the results that were obtained on such a Linux-based cluster platform (connected via Fast Ethernet and SCI) installed at ABB Corporate Research using POLOPT, a state-of-the-art parallel simulation environment for electrostatic and electromagnetic three dimensional problems from High Voltage Engineering. For electrostatic and electromagnetic field simulations in practical High Voltage Engineering, high efficiency was obtained. In addition, a unified execution environment based on MPI has been developed for the POLOPT environment.