FDTD Acceleration for Cylindrical Resonator Design Based on the Hybrid of Single and Double Precision Floating-Point Computation

Abstract

Acceleration of FDTD (finite-difference time-domain) is very important for the fields such as computational electromagnetic simulation. We consider the FDTD simulation model of cylindrical resonator design that requires double precision floating-point and cannot be done using single precision. Conventional FDTD acceleration methods have a common problem of memory-bandwidth limitation due to the large amount of parallel data access. To overcome this problem, we propose a hybrid of single and double precision floating-point computation method that reduces the data-transfer amount. We analyze the characteristics of the FDTD simulation to find out when we can use single precision instead of double precision. According to the experimental results, we achieved over 15 times of speed-up compared to the CPU single-core implementation and over 1.52 times of speed-up compared to the conventional GPU-based implementation.