Performance analysis and optimization of three-dimensional FDTD on GPU using roofline model

The Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method is commonly used for electromagnetic field simulations. Recently, successful hardware-accelerations using Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) have been reported for the large-scale FDTD simulations. In this paper, we present a performance analysis of the three-dimensional (3D) FDTD on GPU using the roofline model. We find that theoretical predictions on maximum performance agrees well with the experimental results. We also suggest the suitable optimization methods for the best performance of FDTD on GPU. In particular, the optimized 3D FDTD program on GPU (NVIDIA Geforce GTX 480) is shown to be 64 times faster than the naively implemented program on CPU (Intel Core i7 2600).