Accelerating the simulation of optical distortion due to atmospheric scintillation using CPUs, GPUs, cell broadband engine and FPGAs

Fast simulation of optical distortions due to atmospheric scintillation is important for simulating adaptive optics configurations, evaluating the performance of laser designators and simulating sensor target threat engagements. The current best published algorithm by Harding et. al. requires 600 seconds for a single simulation when executed as a single threaded on a Intel Xeon quad core processor. In this paper we present our attempts to first optimize this simulation in software and then accelerate it using two Intel Xeon quad core 2 GHz CPUs, a Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 GPU, a 3.19GHz Cell Broadband engine and an array of Spartan 3E FPGAs. Our best multi-core implementation gives us a speed up of 7.6 times, while our GPU and Cell Broadband engine implementations give us a speed up of 473 and 6.8 times respectively over the optimized single threaded version. However, our FPGA implementation delivers the most impressive result of 986 times speed up.