Dispersive Mobius Transform Finite-Element Time-Domain Method On Graphics Processing Units

A novel use of graphics processing units (GPUs) is presented in the execution of the dispersive finite-element time-domain (FETD) method, based upon the Mobius (bilinear) z-transform technique. By utilizing the immense computational power of modern GPUs via NVIDIA's compute unified device architecture (CUDA) language, a narrowing of the performance gap, which currently exists between dispersive FETD methods and their non-dispersive counterparts, can be achieved, thus facilitating the study of a wider range of physical phenomena. An analysis of the z-transform dispersive FETD algorithm is presented in order to both identify dispersive overhead bottlenecks and determine its suitability to parallelization. Numerical studies are then undertaken to measure the performance increase as a function of simulation parameters, such as number of variables, the amount of dispersive material present, and floating point precision.