Parallelization of inverse design of luminaire reflectors

Abstract

This paper presents the parallelization of techniques for the design of reflector shapes from prescribed optical properties (far-field radiance distribution), geometrical constraints and, if available, a user-given initial guess. This is a problem of high importance in the field of Lighting Engineering, more specifically for Luminaire Design. Light propagation inside and outside the optical set must be computed and the resulting radiance distribution compared to the desired one in an iterative process. Constraints on the shape imposed by industry needs must be taken into account, bounding the set of possible shape definitions. A general approach is based on a minimization procedure on the space of possible reflector shapes, starting from a generic or a user-provided shape. This minimization techniques are usually known also as inverse problems, and are very expensive in computational power, requiring a long time to reach a good solution. To reduce this high resource needs we propose a parallel approach, based on SMP and clustering, that can bring the simulation times to a more feasible level.