Efficient Parallel Simulations of Wireless Signal Wave Propagation

A common pattern in high performance scientific computing is the structured grid pattern in which one or more elements of a matrix are computed as a stencil operation of other matrix neighbouring elements. Since there are multiple options to efficiently implement this pattern on modern computing architectures, we provide a comparison of the performance of a number of parallel implementations on a multi-core system with GPU capabilities and also on a FPGA embedded inside a SoC. The application used for this case study implements the propagation of wireless signals in a bi-dimensional environment, considering reflections and signal attenuation. The parallel programming paradigms examined in this paper include CUDA, TBB, Rust, OpenMP, and HLS as hardware description paradigm, with CUDA proving to be the fastest implementation.