high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

This paper presents an implementation of the FDTD-compatible Green’s function on a heterogeneous parallel processing system. The developed implementation simultaneously utilizes computational power of the central processing unit (CPU) and the graphics processing unit (GPU) to the computational tasks best suited to each architecture. Recently, closed-form expression for this discrete Green’s function (DGF) was derived, which facilitates its applications in the FDTD simulations of radiation and scattering problems. Unfortunately, implementation of the new DGF formula in software requires a multiple precision arithmetic and may cause long runtimes. Therefore, an acceleration of the DGF computations on a CPU-GPU heterogeneous parallel processing system was developed using the multiple precision arithmetic and the OpenMP and CUDA parallel programming interfaces. The method avoids drawbacks of the CPU- and GPU-only accelerated implementations of the DGF, i.e. long runtime on the CPU and significant overhead of the GPU initialization respectively for long and short lengths of the DGF waveform. As a result, the seven-fold speedup was obtained relative to the reference DGF implementation on a multicore CPU thus applicability of the DGF in FDTD simulations was significantly improved.