Nvidia CUDA parallel processing of large FDTD meshes in a desktop computer

The Finite Difference in Time Domain numerical (FDTD) method is a well know and mature technique in computational electrodynamics. Usually FDTD is used in the analysis of electromagnetic structures, and antennas. However still there is a high computational burden, which is a limitation for use in combination with optimization algorithms. The parallelization of FDTD to calculate in GPU is possible using Matlab and CUDA tools. For instance, the simulation of a planar array, with a three dimensional FDTD mesh 790x276x588, for 6200 time steps, takes one day -elapsed time- using the CPU of an Intel Core i3 at 2.4GHz in a personal computer, 8Gb RAM. This time is reduced 120 times when the calculation is parallelized and carried out in a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11264 MB GDDR 5X. The elapsed time is reduced substantially, but also the simplicity of calculation and usefulness of a Matlab implementation. The elapsed time reduction is so substantial that the FDTD-Matlab-CUDA can be combined with optimization algorithms.