High resolution tsunami inundation simulations

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the high performance computing efficiency of the shallow water soft- ware package ANUGA . This package is developed as a collaborative project between the Australian National University (ANU) and Geoscience Australia (GA) and is available as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). ANUGA uses a shallow water model and approximates the model using the finite volume method based on unstructured meshes of triangles. The geometrical flexibility of unstructured meshes is convenient for tsunami inundation modeling where the tsunami wave source generally consists of long wavelength components, and waves around the coast consists of short wavelengths, which can both be modeled in the same simulation. ANUGA is written in the high level computer language PYTHON. We will present an overview of the model and the numerical method in the early sections of the paper. We will then present our work on parallelizing the ANUGA code, in particular our efforts to obtain efficient simulations using 100s of CPU cores. Our results demonstrate that our PYTHON based software can obtain high efficiency on highly parallel computers. The results presented in this paper demonstrate better than real time simulation of medium resolution (millions of triangles) tsunami models. Our ultimate goal is the solution of high resolution (tens of millions of triangles) simulations in better than real time.