Performance analysis of finite-difference time-domain schemes for acoustic simulation implemented on multi-core and many-core processor architectures

Abstract

There have been many discussions about hardware-accelerations for the large-scale finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method to deal with various wave dynamics in scientific and engineering computations. Recently, there is growing interest in many-core based parallel computing with graphics processing unit (GPU) or many integrated Core (MIC) accelerators. Therefore, it is worth applying those to large-scale and long-time acoustic simulation for FDTD methods. In this paper, performance analyses are performed for three types of acoustic FDTD schemes, which are FDTD(2,2), FDTD(2,4) and wave equation FDTD (WE-FDTD)(2,2), implemented on GPU, Intel MIC, and multi-core central processing unit (CPU). Here, FDTD(T, S) denotes Tth-order accuracy for the time derivative and Sth-order accuracy for the spatial derivative, respectively. The parallelized FDTD schemes are implemented with Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and OpenACC, respectively, on GPU, and OpenMP for MIC and multi-core CPU. As a method for performance analysis, we employ the modified roofline model which adds the concept of cache hit ratio to operational intensity. The analysis provides performance comparison results of attainable performance and measured performance for each FDTD scheme and each processor. We performed software optimizations for MIC based on the performance analysis and achieved 78%-91% of attainable performance on MIC.