GPU-accelerated finite-difference time-domain method for dielectric media based on CUDA

Abstract

The simulation of electromagnetic (EM) waves propagation in the dielectric media is presented using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) implementation of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method on graphic processing unit (GPU). The FDTD formulation in the dielectric media is derived in detail, and GPU-accelerated FDTD method based on CUDA programming model is described in the flowchart. The accuracy and speedup of the presented CUDA-implemented FDTD method are validated by the numerical simulation of the EM waves propagating into the lossless and lossy dielectric media from the free space on GPU, by comparison with the original FDTD method on CPU. The comparison of the numerical results of CUDA-implemented FDTD method on GPU and original FDTD method on CPU demonstrates that the CUDA-implemented FDTD method on GPU can obtain better application speedup performance with reasonable accuracy. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 26:512–518, 2016.