CELES: CUDA-accelerated simulation of electromagnetic scattering by large ensembles of spheres

Abstract

CELES is a freely available MATLAB toolbox to simulate light scattering by many spherical particles. Aiming at high computational performance, CELES leverages block-diagonal preconditioning, a lookup-table approach to evaluate costly functions and massively parallel execution on NVIDIA graphics processing units using the CUDA computing platform. The combination of these techniques allows to efficiently address large electrodynamic problems ($>10^4$ scatterers) on inexpensive consumer hardware. In this paper, we validate near- and far-field distributions against the well-established multi-sphere $T$-matrix (MSTM) code and discuss the convergence behavior for ensembles of different sizes, including an exemplary system comprising $10^5$ particles