Graphical Processing Units (GPU)-based modeling for Acoustic and Ultrasonic NDE

摘要

With rapidly improving computational power numerical models are being developed for ever more complex problems that cannot be solved analytically, making them more and more computationally intensive. Parallel computing has emerged as an important paradigm to speed up the processing of such models. In recent years graphics processing units (GPU) are among the massively parallel devices widely available to the commodity market. General purpose computing on these devices went mainstream after the introduction of NVIDA 'compute unified device architecture' (CUDA). Here we develop CUDA implementations of the finite difference time domain (FDTD) scheme for three-dimensional problems of acoustic and two-dimensional problems of ultrasonic NDE. Simulations are run on the commodity GPU GeForce 9800GT. Results show a strong improvement in the speed of computation as compared to that of a serial implementation on a CPU. We also discuss the accuracy of GPU-based computation.