A Multi-GPU Fast Iterative Method for Eikonal Equations Using on-the-fly Adaptive Domain Decomposition

Abstract

The recent research trend of Eikonal solver focuses on employing state-of-the-art parallel computing technology, such as GPUs. Even though there exists previous work on GPU-based parallel Eikonal solvers, only little research literature exists on the multi-GPU Eikonal solver due to its complication in data and work management. In this paper, we propose a novel on-the-fly, adaptive domain decomposition method for efficient implementation of the Block-based Fast Iterative Method on a multi-GPU system. The proposed method is based on dynamic domain decomposition so that the region to be processed by each GPU is determined on-the-fly when the solver is running. In addition, we propose an efficient domain assignment algorithm that minimizes communication overhead while maximizing load balancing between GPUs. The proposed method scales well, up to 6.17× for eight GPUs, and can handle large computing problems that do not fit to limited GPU memory. We assess the parallel efficiency and runtime performance of the proposed method on various distance computation examples using up to eight GPUs.