Modern Hardware to Simulate Tsunami Wave Propagation

Abstract

Problem of tsunami risks evaluation, assessment and mitigation is here addressed. Modern computational technologies are able to calculate accurately tsunami wave propagation over the deep ocean provided that initial displacement (perturbation of the sea bed at tsunami source) is known. Modern deep ocean tsunameters provide direct measurement of the passing tsunami wave in the real time mode, which help to estimate initial displacement parameters right after the tsunami wave is recorded at one of the deep ocean buoys. Therefore, fast tsunami propagation code that can calculate tsunami evolution from estimated model source becomes critical for timely evacuation decision for many coastal communities in case of a strong tsunami. In this paper we discuss a part of MOST (Method of Splitting Tsunami) software package, which has been accepted by the USA National Ocean and Atmosphere Administration as the basic tool to calculate tsunami wave propagation and to evaluate of inundation parameters. Our main objectives are to speed up the existing sequential program, and to adapt this program for shared memory systems (OpenMP), CELL BE architecture and GPU. For caring out this research we use SMP server and a system build on IBM CELL BE CPU. We also use NVIDIA Tesla C1060 board which acts as co-processor for CPU. Optimization of the existing parallel and sequential code for the task of tsunami wave propagation modeling as well as an adaptation of this code for GPU and CELL BE processor is discussed. The obtained results are up to 170 times performance gain for one time step. These are very promising.