Simulation of an inelastic dispersive phenomenon: stimulated Brillouin scattering in a single-mode fiber segment through parallelism

Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is one of the most important nonlinear phenomena because it limits the maximum transmission power in modern optical communication systems. Unfortunately, the simulation of SBS is time-consuming, since it requires estimating the solutions for a set of complex differential equations that describe this phenomenon. In this paper, a novel high-performance computing model intended to analyze the main dispersive effects present in modern fiber communication systems is proposed. A full optical characterization of the simulation results is included and compared with the efficiency and improved speed of our parallel implementation versus a previous sequential model for SBS. Also, an evaluation of the throughput of our parallel implementation using both central processing unit multi-core and graphics processing unit is presented. Results show that parallelism increases the performance of the simulation tenfold.