ACCESS - ACCelerator for Electromagnetic Scattering Simulations

Determining the scattering properties of small boats on a rough sea surface is a problem of high importance to the Navy. Due to the conducting nature of the surrounding water, the scattering signature of the boat cannot be determined just from a geometrical model in vacuum, but requires the simulation of its environment as well. The resulting simulations require large amounts of memory and computing time and innovation is required to accelerate these simulations. During the Phase I, we demonstrated that graphics processing units (GPUs) can be used to accelerate a key algorithm for electromagnetic scattering simulations, a parallel out-of-core dense solver, by at least an order of magnitude. Based on inferred scaling laws we expect this speedup to be maintained for systems beyond 1,000,000 unknowns. The Phase II project will be split into a base and an option period. The goal of the Phase II base period is to incorporate the GPU accelerated solver into the widely used electromagnetic modeling code WIPL-D. In addition, we will investigate GPU acceleration of the matrix-fill part. In the Phase II Option period we will then investigate the suitability of GPUs to accelerate a more approximate method, the fast multipole method.