high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

The method Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) is widely used in electromagnetic simulations to solve problems of microwave tomography, radar and telecommunications. Since this method is a data intensive and computation intensive problem, there are a lot of initiatives to improve the scalability and the performance of the FDTD. Despite the progress, performance in FDTD simulation is still a challenge, especially in situations with experiments with large environments, complex objects and/or electromagnetic waves with a wide range of frequencies. The use of GPU to accelerate the FDTD, which has a good cost-benefit, is especially in focus, offering a speedup of hundreds of times if compared to the traditional CPU computation. The memory manager is the main issue to improve the performance of FDTD over GPU. This work presents a solution which uses overlapping subgrids in order to increase the efficiency in the memory access. The performed tests show a speedup of 1.7 times of the proposed solution when compared to the current FDTD over GPU.