FPGA-based high-order finite difference algorithm for 2D acoustic wave propagation problems
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Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method is the most commonly used numerical algorithm for simulating linear wave propagation phenomena in geophysics, electromagnetics, and aero- or marine-acoustics applications. Unfortunately, evaluating time-evolution for millions to trillions of discrete spatial points is computational intensive, especially when the geometrical size under study is much larger than the wavelength of excitations or long time integration is needed. In this paper, we proposed an FPGA-based hardware implementation to accelerate these simulation tasks. By adopting high-order temporal and spatial finite difference numerical algorithms along with efficient on-chip memory architecture, we alleviate the bandwidth bottleneck between the FPGA chip and onboard memories at the cost of increased computational burdens, which are absorbed effectively into the pipelined computing engine without speed penalty. The speed of our design implemented on Xilinx ML401 Virtex-4 evaluation platform is about 720 times faster than a pure software implementation of the same algorithm running on a 3.0GHz DELL workstation. Moreover, the desirable properties of simplicity and scalability make our design compatible with most commercial reconfigurable coprocessor platforms and correspondingly, the performance would be proportional to their available onboard memory bandwidth.
