A GPU-Based Simulation of Tsunami Propagation and Inundation

Abstract

Tsunami simulation consists of fluid dynamics, numerical computations, and visualization techniques. Nonlinear shallow water equations are often used to model the tsunami propagation. By adding the friction slope to the conservation of momentum, it also can model the tsunami inundation. To solve these equations, we use the second order finite difference MacCormack method. Since it is a finite difference method, it brings the possibility to be parallelized. We use the parallelism provided by GPU to speed up the computations. By loading data as textures in GPU memory, the computation processes can be written as shader programs and the operations will be done by GPU in parallel. The results show that with the help of GPU, the simulation can get a significant improvement in the execution time for each of the computation steps.