Micromagnetic formulation for the personal computer

Algorithms for calculating the equilibrium energy state of a three-dimensional ferromagnetic particle according to an earlier micromagnetic formulation can now be implemented on a personal computer (PC). Some PC enhancement boards are now very fast by normal standards. For instance, the Mercury 6400 is rated at 20 MFlops (million floating point operations per second). The 20-MHz Definicon DSIT4-1/800 transputer, used for much of the present work, although slower (1.5 MFlops), is still able to perform the numerical convergence in a respectable time by using a progressive minimization procedure. Other numerical techniques which have employed supercomputers arrive at similar estimations of energy levels and magnetic structure; this indicates that the present technique is dependable. Several examples that demonstrate this are discussed.