Parallelized finite difference time domain room acoustic simulation
Cameron J. Fackler, Jonathan M. Botts, Ning Xiang · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2012
A parallelized room acoustics simulator based on the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method is developed, utilizing a Blue Gene/L supercomputer. Wave-based methods such as FDTD are desirable for use in room acoustics simulations since they account for effects such as diffraction and interference. However, such methods require large amounts of computational power and memory, especially when simulating large volumes or high frequencies. To utilize the power of modern computing systems and move toward large-scale simulations of realistic concert halls, a parallel FDTD implementation is written in the C++ programming language with the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. The volume to be simulated is partitioned into blocks, which efficiently update shared interfaces between nearest neighbors using the Blue Gene architecture's point-to-point communication network. Several compact explicit FDTD schemes are compared using simulations of various spatial volumes, executed on varying numbers of processors. The use of a Blue Gene/L supercomputer demonstrates substantial speedup over an equivalent serial implementation.