Accelerating FDTD simulation of microwave pulse coupling into narrow slots on the Intel MIC architecture

The coupling of microwaves into apertures plays an important part in many electromagnetic physics and engineering fields. When the width of apertures is very small, Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) simulation of the coupling is very time-consuming. As a many-core architecture, the Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture owns 512-bit vector units and more than 200 threads. In this paper, we parallelize FDTD simulation of microwave pulse coupling into narrow slots on the Intel MIC architecture. In the implementation, the parallel programming model OpenMP is used to exploit thread parallelism while loop unrolling and SIMD intrinsic functions are utilized to accomplish vectorization. Compared with the serial version on Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPU, the implementation on the MIC coprocessor including 57 cores obtains a speedup of 11.57 times. The experiment results also demonstrate that the parallelization has good scalability in performance. Additionally, how binding relationship between OpenMP threads and hardware threads in MIC influences performance is also reported.