Parallel tsunami simulation and visualization on tiled display wall using OpenGL Shading Language

Abstract

Tsunami simulation consists of fluid dynamics, numerical computations, and visualization techniques. Nonlinear shallow water equations are often used to model the tsunami propagation. Tsunami inundation is modeled by adding the friction slope to the conservation of momentum. The two-step second-order finite difference MacCormack numerical method can solve these equations. It is well suited for nonlinear equations and simpler for related application development. In addition, the finite difference method can be computed in parallel. The programmable graphics hardware allows general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPUs) to solve the MacCormack method in parallel to speed up the simulation. Tsunami simulation data can be loaded as textures data in graphics memory, the computation processes can be written as shader programs using OpenGL Shading Language so that the operations can be computed by graphics processors in parallel. We developed different versions of the tsunami simulation and visualization programs: (i) CPU-based, and (ii) CPU–GPU collaboration to implement the MacCormack numerical method. The performance results showed that graphics hardware accelerated simulation had a significant improvement in the execution time of each computation step. Real-time simulation and visualization are made possible by the programmable shaders. Furthermore, we achieved high-performance parallel visualization on a tiled display wall with a cluster of computers.