3-D Parallel Fault Simulation With GPGPU

General purpose computing on graphical processing units (GPGPU) is a paradigm shift in computing that promises a dramatic increase in performance. GPGPU also brings an unprecedented level of complexity in algorithmic design and software development. In this paper, we present an efficient parallel fault simulator, FSimGP², that exploits the high degree of parallelism supported by a state-of-the-art graphic processing unit (GPU) with the NVIDIA compute unified device architecture. A novel 3-D parallel fault simulation technique is proposed to achieve extremely high computation efficiency on the GPU. Global communication is minimized by concentrating as much work as possible on the local device´s memory. We present results on a GPU platform from NVIDIA (a GeForce GTX 285 graphics card) that demonstrate a speedup of up to 63× and 4× compared to two other GPU-based fault simulators and up to 95× over a state-of-the-art algorithm on conventional processor architectures.