Finite difference numerical simulations of acoustic fields using the graphic processing unit

The finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is widely used in numerical simulations of acoustic fields. When the size of the model is too large, the amount of the grid points in the computational region is correspondingly huge, then the simulation will cost a lot of calculation time using CPU in a serial program. In this paper we use the graphic processing unit (GPU) to solve this problem. First, we use GPU to accelerate the numerical simulation of 2D second-order FDTD for the fluid medium model and get a 50-time speedup. Then we accelerate a 3-D model in horizontally layered isotropic medium and obtain a 10-time speedup. Based on this research, we can use GPU to accelerate simulations of more complicated models with MPI or OpenMP.