FDTD Acceleration using MATLAB Parallel Computing Toolbox and GPU

─ We present a MATLAB based finite difference time domain (FDTD) method accelerated using the GPU functions in MATLAB’s parallel computing toolbox (PCT). Procedures to achieve significant speedups over a CPU implementation of the same code are outlined. The use of specialized code with NVIDIA's compute unified device architecture (CUDA) programming results in impressive computational speedups. However, this requires specialized programming knowledge to efficiently implement. The MATLAB PCT can be applied directly to pre-existing MATLAB FDTD code and obtain reasonable speedups over equivalent CPU code. We demonstrate several modifications to increase the efficiency on several different NVIDIA graphics cards. Benchmarks are presented on problems of practical size (millions of cells) with a CPML terminated domain. Index Terms ─ FDTD, GPU, MATLAB.