The electromagnetic waves propagation in unmagnetized plasma media using parallelized finite-difference time-domain method

The finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method has been commonly utilized to simulate the electromagnetic (EM) waves propagation in the plasma media. However, the FDTD method may bring about extra run-time on concerning computationally large and complicated EM problems. Fortunately, the FDTD method is easy to parallelize. Besides, GPU has been widely used for parallel computing due to its unique SPMD (Single Program Multiple Data) architecture. In this paper, we represent the parallel Runge-Kutta exponential time differencing scheme FDTD (RKETD) method for the unmagnetized plasma implemented on GPU. The detailed flowchart of parallel RKETD-FDTD method is described. The accuracy and acceleration performance of the proposed parallel RKETD-FDTD method implemented on GPU are substantiated by calculating the reflection and transmission coefficients for one-dimensional unmagnetized plasma slab. The results indicate that the numerical precision of the parallel RKETD-FDTD scheme is consistent with that of the code implemented on CPU. The computation efficiency is greatly improved compared with merely CPU-based serial RKETD-FDTD method. Moreover, the comparisons of the performance of CUDA-based GPU parallel program, OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing)-based CPU parallel program, and single-CPU serial program on the same host computer are done. Compared with the serial program, both parallel programs get good results, while GPU-based parallel program gains better result.