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. The resulting simulations require large amounts of compute time and mechanisms are sought to accelerate them. The demand for highly realistic graphics has pushed graphics processing units (GPU) on video cards to the point where they easily outperform general purpose processors for floating-point operations. The goal of this project is to develop a GPU-based system to accelerate widely used electromagnetic modeling tools. During the Phase I, we will accelerate an out-of-core solver for linear equations on GPUs. We will test this implementation by comparing the results to a trusted simulation code. In addition, we will perform parallel scaling studies, develop a performance model and design a hardware configuration that will enable simulations of interest to the Navy within reasonable time. During the Phase I Option period, we will tune these prototypes and accelerate a parallel iterative solver on GPUs. The goal of the Phase II project is then to tune these algorithms and incorporate them into commercial electromagnetic simulation codes. We will also implement solvers with higher precision in order to accelerate simulations with demand for high accuracy.