GPU accelerated fully space and time resolved numerical simulations of self-focusing laser beams in SBS-active media

A computer cluster equipped with Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) is used for simulating nonlinear optical wave packets undergoing Kerr self-focusing and stimulated Brillouin scattering in fused silica. We first recall the model equations in full (3 + 1) dimensions. These consist of two coupled nonlinear Schrodinger equations for counterpropagating optical beams closed with a source equation for light-induced acoustic waves seeded by thermal noise. Compared with simulations on a conventional cluster of Central Processing Units (CPUs), GPU-based computations allow us to use a significant (16 times) larger number of mesh points within similar computation times. Reciprocally, simulations employing the same number of mesh points are between 3 and 20 times faster on GPUs than on the same number of classical CPUs. Performance speedups close to 45 are reported for isolated functions evaluating, e. g., the optical nonlinearities. Since the field intensities may reach the ionization threshold of silica, the action of a defocusing electron plasma is also addressed. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.