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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society journal 2010-04, Vol.25 (4), p.294
Main Author: Ujaldon, Manuel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Graphics processing units
Simulation
Supercomputers
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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
ISSN:1054-4887
1943-5711