Simulation of nonlinear signal propagation in multimode fibers on multi-GPU systems

Abstract

Mode-division multiplexing (MDM) is seen as a possible solution to satisfy the rising capacity demands of optical communication networks. To make MDM a success, fibers supporting the propagation of a huge number of modes, i.e. several tens, are of interest. Many of the system aspects occurring during the propagation can be evaluated by using appropriate models. However, fibers are a nonlinear medium and, therefore, numerical simulations are required. For a large number of modes, the simulation of the nonlinear signal propagation in particular for telecommunication leads to new challenges, for example regarding the required memory, which we address with an implementation incorporating multiple GPU-accelerators. In this paper, we evaluate two different approaches to realize the communication between the GPUs and analyze the performance for simulations involving up to 8 Tesla GPUs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first who explore a multi-GPU approach to simulate the nonlinear signal propagation in multimode fibers. This allows us to show results for an MDM transmission system utilizing the extremely large number of 120 spatial modes in a fiber with a core diameter of 62.5 µm as an application example and to analyze the impact of the nonlinear effects on the transmitted signals.