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 possible breakdown paths. For this purpose 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 of the resulting system, and the evaluation along the field-lines all require to carry out the same type of calculation many times. Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) promise to be more efficient than Central Processing Units (CPUs) when it is possible to do the same type of calculations for large blocks of data in parallel. In this paper we therefore investigate if GPU acceleration is a measure to further speed up the established CPU-parallel BEM solver.