Speed-Up of Acoustic Propagation Program by Time-Domain Difference Method Using a Supercomputer

Abstract

The FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) method is a simple and high-precision numerical method in the underwater acoustic field. For large-scale underwater acoustic field simulations with the FDTD method, it is necessary to use vector and parallel computations. One method of parallel computation is to use a PC cluster; this method has already been reported at this society. Another way is to perform vector and parallel calculations using a supercomputer. In this work, we used a supercomputer to attempt vector and parallel computations, which were possible to achieve by making small changes to an existing program. We adjusted the program to optimize the vector and parallel computations, and found that the speed was improved by a factor of 32 for vector computation and 6 for parallel computation.