Computing room acoustics with CUDA - 3D FDTD schemes with boundary losses and viscosity

In seeking to model realistic room acoustics, direct numerical simulation can be employed. This paper presents 3D Finite Difference Time Domain schemes that incorporate losses at boundaries and due to the viscosity of air. These models operate within a virtual room designed on a detailed floor plan. The schemes are computed at 44.1kHz, using large-scale data sets containing up to 100 million points each. A performance comparison is made between serial computation in C, and parallel computation using CUDA on GPUs, showing up to 80 times speed-ups. Testing on two different Nvidia Tesla cards shows the benefits of the latest FERMI architecture for double precision floating-point computation.