Using GPUs for Accelerating Electromagnetic Simulations

The computational power and memory bandwidth of graphics processing units (GPUs) have turned them into attractive platforms for general-purpose applications at significant speed gains versus their CPU counterparts [1]. In addition, an increasing number of today's state-ofthe-art supercomputers include commodity GPUs to bring us unprecedented levels of performance in terms of raw GFLOPS and GFLOPS/cost. Inspired by the latest trends and developments in GPUs, we propose a new paradigm for implementing on GPUs some of the major aspects of electromagnetic simulations, a domain traditionally used as a benchmark to run codes in some of the most expensive and powerful supercomputers worldwide. After reviewing related achievements and ongoing projects, we provide a guideline to exploit SIMD parallelism and high memory bandwidth using the CUDA programming model and hardware architecture offered by Nvidia graphics cards at an affordable cost. As a result, performance gains of several orders of magnitude can be attained versus threadlevel methods like pthreads used to run those simulations on emerging multicore architectures Index Terms Graphics processors, electromagnetic simulations, CUDA, GPGPU.

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