Parallelization of Ultrasound Simulations Using 2D Decomposition

This thesis is a part of the k-Wave project, which is a toolbox for the simulation and reconstruction of acoustic wave felds and one of its main contributions is the planning of focused ultrasound surgeries (HIFU). One simulation can take tens of hours and about 60% of the simulation time is taken by the calculation of the 3D Fast Fourier transforms. Up until now the 3D FFT has been calculated purely by the FFTW library and its 1D decomposition, whose major limitation is the maximum number of employable cores. Therefore we introduce a new approach, called the 2D hybrid decomposition of the 3D FFT (HybridFFT), where we combine both MPI processes and OpenMP threads to reach as best performance as possible. On a low number of cores, on the order of a few hundreds, we are about as fast or slightly faster than FFTW and pure MPI 2D decomposition libraries (PFFT and P3DFFT). One of the best results was achieved on a 512^3FFT using 512 cores, where our hybrid version run 31ms, FFTW run 39ms and PFFT run 44ms. The most significant performance advantage should be seen when employing around 8-16 thousand cores, however we haven't had an access to a machine with such resources. Almost a linear scalability has been proven for up to 2048 employed cores