期刊名称:International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
印刷版ISSN:1687-7195
电子版ISSN:1687-7209
出版年度:2017
卷号:2017
DOI:10.1155/2017/6817674
出版社:Hindawi Publishing Corporation
摘要:Finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is a very poplar way of numerically solving partial differential equations. FDTD has a low operational intensity so that the performances in CPUs and GPUs are often restricted by the memory bandwidth. Recently, deeply pipelined FPGA accelerators have shown a lot of success by exploiting streaming data flows in FDTD computation. In spite of this success, many FPGA accelerators are not suitable for real-world applications that contain complex boundary conditions. Boundary conditions break the regularity of the data flow, so that the performances are significantly reduced. This paper proposes an FPGA accelerator that computes commonly used absorbing and periodic boundary conditions in many 3D FDTD applications. Accelerator is designed using a “C-like” programming language called OpenCL (open computing language). As a result, the proposed accelerator can be customized easily by changing the software code. According to the experimental results, we achieved over 3.3 times and 1.5 times higher processing speed compared to the CPUs and GPUs, respectively. Moreover, the proposed accelerator is more than 14 times faster compared to the recently proposed FPGA accelerators that are capable of handling complex boundary conditions.