EM Photonics, Inc., a leading provider of accelerated hardware technologies, released FastFDTD, a free 2D and 3D accelerated FDTD solver based on GPU technology. The FastFDTD toolkit contains all files and documentation necessary to accelerate FDTD computations using a simple input file format. The 2D and 3D solvers include a variety of sources and materials, and more are being added. When asked why EM Photonics was providing this toolkit for free, Eric Kelmelis, Vice President, said

We decided to release our GPU-based FDTD accelerator free of charge to demonstrate the power of application acceleration with alternative computational platforms. This solver shows a single graphics card running 20-30 times faster than an optimized software implementation. Our focus will remain on pushing the boundaries of this technology and accelerating other applications with commodity hardware devices such as graphics cards and FPGAs.

For more information, including specific feature sets, compatible graphics cards, and detailed license information, please visit the FastFDTD webpage at http://www.emphotonics.com/fastfdtd.html