A hardware acceleration of the time domain boundary integral equation method for the wave equation in two dimensions

We aimed at reducing the runtime of the time domain boundary integral equation method (TDBIEM) for the two-dimensional scalar wave equation by the help of a special-purpose computer MDGRAPE-2, which is a high-performance vector-parallel computer dedicated to computing long-range forces in classical molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we presented a formulation to make MDGRAPE-2 compute the layer potential that is the most time-consuming in a run of the TDBIEM, considering to minimise the amount of data-transfer between MDGRAPE-2 and the host computer. The newly implemented TDBIEM code using three MDGRAPE-2s boards was about 109 times faster than the conventional code in an analysis of 5400 boundary elements and 640 time steps. We also demonstrated that the present hardware acceleration helps to perform large-scale simulations such as light propagation in photonic crystals.