Investigation of accelerating numerical-field analysis methods for electric machines with the incorporation of graphic-processor based parallel processing techniques

This paper assesses the application of parallel methods to graphic processing units to solve electric-machine field-analysis problems. Current serial-solving techniques do not allow for real time simulation, and waiting for the computational capability to improve enough does not seem practical. The background of graphic-processing-unit based programming that incorporates parallel programming techniques is explored and shown to be an alternative approach for accelerating existing numerical-field analysis techniques. With the advent of C-based coding languages for graphic processing units, existing MATLAB routines can be transitioned to parallel methods by porting functions. Finally, the issues associated with utilizing these techniques are explored in a boundary-element based field-analysis problem.