9.2     GPU Computing

Due to still growing demands regarding the simulation speed, QuickWave offers GPU computing with QW-Simulator GPU. QW-Simulator GPU is a version of QW-Simulator designated for massive parallel computing hardware. It incorporates parts of QW-Simulator code re-written in OpenCL. From the application point of view, a GPU can be treated as a computational coprocessor. QW-Simulator GPU run on contemporary GPUs provides two major advantages. The first aspect is its massive parallelisation, in a sense that different FDTD cells are calculated by different threads and in different processing units, at the same time. The other aspect is a very fast access to local memory resulting in a very large memory bandwidth.

QWED has made an extensive effort to provide the code providing the best possible speedups for most practical scenarios.

For detailed discussion concerning the GPU computation available in QuickWave refer to QW-Simulator GPU Manual.