An FPGA implementation of 3D numerical simulations on a 2D SIMD array processor

Three-dimensional (3D) numerical simulation is an indispensable technique for various analyses of physical phenomena, but it generally requires numerous computation. In this paper, we propose an FPGA-based accelerator for 3D numerical simulations and focus on acceleration of the 3D finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. This accelerator consists of a 2D single instruction multiple data (SIMD) array processor, and it can execute 3D parallel computing with little data transfer overhead by applying virtual processing-elements cuboid (VPEC) with synchronous shift data transfer. We demonstrate that the experimental hardware implemented on an Altera Stratix V FPGA (5SGSMD5K2F40C2N) is 3.1 times faster than parallel computing on the NVIDIA Tesla C2075, and it reaches a 94.57% operating rate of the calculation units for the computation of the 3D FDTD method. The proposed accelerator is suitable for multi-chip composition.