Dielectric breakdown prediction with GPU-accelerated BEM

Abstract: The prediction of a dielectric breakdown in a high-voltage device is based on criteria that evaluate the electric field along field lines. Therefore it is necessary to efficiently compute the electric field at arbitrary points in space. A boundary element method (BEM) based on an indirect formulation, realized with MPI-parallel collocation, has proven to cope very well with this requirement. It deploys surface meshes only, which are easy to generate even for complex industrial geometries. The assembly of the large dense BEM-matrix, as well as the iterative solution process of the resulting system and the evaluation along the field-lines all require us to carry out the same type of calculation many times. Graphical processing units (GPUs) promise to be more efficient than standard processors (CPUs) in these situations. In this paper we investigate if GPU acceleration can speed up the established CPU-parallel BEM solver.