A Fast Runtime Visualization of a GPU-Based 3D-FDTD Electromagnetic Simulation

In this paper, we present design and implementation of a fast runtime visualizer for a GPU-based 3D-FDTD electromagnetic simulation. We focus on improving the productivity of simulator development without compromising simulation performance. In order to keep the portability, we implemented a visualizer with the MVC model, where simulation kernels and visualization process were completely separated. For high-speed visualization, an interoperability mechanism between OpenGL and CUDA was used in addition to efficient utilization of programmable shaders. We also propose an asynchronous multi-threaded execution with a triple-buffering technique so that developers can concentrate on developing their simulation kernels. As a result of empirical visualization experiments of electromagnetic simulations for practical antenna design, it was revealed that our implementation achieved a rendering throughput of 90 FPS for a view port of 512 x 512 pixels, which corresponds to a 12.9 times speedup compared to when the OpenGL-CUDA interoperability mechanism was not utilized. When a standard visualization throughput of 60 FPS was selected, the performance overhead imposed by the visualization process was 15.8%, which was reasonably low compared to a speedup of the simulation kernel gained by the GPU acceleration.