Performance evaluation of a multi-gpu enabled finite element method for computational electromagnetics

Abstract

We study the performance of a multi-GPU enabled numerical methodology for the simulation of electromagnetic wave propagation in complex domains and heterogeneous media. For this purpose, the system of time-domain Maxwell equations is discretized by a discontinuous finite element method which is formulated on an unstructured tetrahedral mesh and which relies on a high order interpolation of the electromagnetic field components within a mesh element. The resulting numerical methodology is adapted to parallel computing on a cluster of GPU acceleration cards by adopting a hybrid strategy which combines a coarse grain SPMD programming model for inter-GPU parallelization and a fine grain SIMD programming model for intra-GPU parallelization. The performance improvement resulting from this multiple-GPU algorithmic adaptation is demonstrated through three-dimensional simulations of the propagation of an electromagnetic wave in the head of a mobile phone user. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.