With the
ongoing research of Free-Electron Lasers (FEL) numerical codes have
been written to help with the design and the analysis of the results.
Most of the codes have their origin in a time where computer resources
were sparse and an efficient algorithm kept the memory and cpu time
demand in reasonable limits. These algorithms have provided excellent
agreement with experimental agreement but are limited by their underlying
approximation. With the ongoing evolution in computer resources (speed,
memory, parallel architectures) new algorithms becomes feasible. This
presentation discusses the challenges in the numerical modeling of FEL
processes of existing codes and compares them to alternative methods
based on high-performance computation.