Fast parallel simulation of fiber optical communication systems accelerated by a graphics processing unit

A parallel implementation of the split-step Fourier method utilizing the general purpose parallel computing architecture for graphics processing units CUDA is presented. Results of the GPU-implementation are compared to a conventional CPU-based approach regarding computation time and accuracy. We developed a novel implementation with a significantly higher accuracy than the CUDA intrinsic FFT in single precision mode yielding a high speed-up factor of up to 144 compared to a CPU implementation.