Accelerating the Simulation of Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) with GPU

In this paper, we discuss the implementation of three dimensional FDTD method to Nvidia’s CUDA architecture. Finite-difference time-domain is a numerical analysis technique used for modeling computational electrodynamics. Since it is a time-domain method, FDTD solutions can cover a wide frequency range with a single simulation run, and treat nonlinear material properties in a natural way. Because FDTD requires the grid must be sufficiently fine to resolve both the smallest electromagnetic wavelength and the smallest geometrical feature in the model, it may result in very long simulation time. OpenMP, MPI, SIMD technique can be used to speed up the simulation. Another technology, Nvidia’s CUDA, allows the time to be reduced a lot.