A Hybrid Approach for Solving the 3D Helmholtz Equation on Heterogeneous Platforms

We are interested in the resolution of the 3D Helmholtz equation for real applications. Solving this problem numerically is a computational challenge due to the large memory requirements of the matrices and vectors involved.For these cases, the massive parallelism of GPU architectures and the high performance at lower energy of the multicores can be exploited. To do a fair comparison between the benefit of accelerating the three-dimensional Helmholtz equation using GPU architectures and multicore platforms, this paper describes three different parallelization schemes on a multi-GPU cluster and also includes an evaluation of their performance. The three parallel schemes consist of:(1) using the multicore processors (CPU version), (2) using the GPU devices (GPU version); and (3) using a hybrid implementation which combines CPU cores and GPU devices simultaneously (hybrid version).Experimental results show that our hybrid implementation outperforms the other approaches in terms of performance.