A GPU-based implementation of the spatial impulse response method for fast calculation of linear sound fields and pulse-echo responses of array transducers

A commonly used program for the simulation of linear sound fields and pulse-echo responses of transducers is FieldII which is based on the spatial impulse response (SIR) method. However, with the introduction of 2D array transducers, the complexity of the simulations leads to long computation times. Modern hardware is aimed at executing a high number of tasks across parallel computing nodes, which is particularly suited for linear problems. The aim of this work was therefore to develop a simulation tool (Simpulse) extensively making use of parallelization to speed up the simulation process.