Solving the Maxwell-Bloch equations for resonant nonlinear optics using GPUs

We solve the Maxwell-Bloch equations of resonant nonlinear optics using GPUs and compare the computation times with traditional single- and multithreaded programs. A detailed benchmarking of programs as a function of various parameters shows how the massive parallelism built into GPUs becomes more and more advantageous as the physical problem becomes more and more demanding. For the case of multimode light propagating through an inhomogeneously broadened medium of many-level quantum systems, the program executing on GPUs can be over 20 times faster than that executing on all cores of a modern CPU. The methods presented can be applied in a wide area of atomic physics where the time evolution of atomic ensembles is to be computed.