Scalability of Higher-Order Discontinuous Galerkin FEM Computations for Solving Electromagnetic Wave Propagation Problems on GPU Clusters

Author

Gödel, Nico ; Nunn, Nigel ; Warburton, Tim ; Clemens, Markus

Author_Institution

Fac. of Electr. Eng., Univ. of the Fed. Armed Forces Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Volume

46

Issue

8

fYear

2010

Firstpage

3469

Lastpage

3472

Abstract

A highly parallel implementation of Maxwell´s equations in the time domain using a cluster of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is presented. The higher-order Discontinuous Galerkin Finite Element Method (DG-FEM) is used for spatial discretization since its characteristics are matching the parallelization design aspects of the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) programming model. Asynchronous data transfer is introduced to minimize parallelization overhead and improve parallel efficiency. The implementation is benchmarked with help of a realistic 3-D geometry of an electromagnetic compatibility problem.

Keywords

Galerkin method; Maxwell equations; electromagnetic wave propagation; finite element analysis; GPU clusters; Maxwell equations; NVIDIA compute unified device architecture programming model; asynchronous data transfer; electromagnetic wave propagation; finite element method; graphics processing units; high-order discontinuous Galerkin FEM computation; realistic 3-D geometry; spatial discretization; Computer architecture; Concurrent computing; Electromagnetic propagation; Finite element methods; Geometry; Graphics; Maxwell equations; Moment methods; Parallel programming; Scalability; CUDA; FEM; GPGPU; GPU-computing; discontinuous Galerkin; high order;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9464

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TMAG.2010.2046022

Filename

5513006