Numerical Simulation of a Tsunami on a GPU

On December 26, 2004, an undersea megathrust earthquake triggered a series of deadly tsunamis that killed lots of people and damaged large properties bordering the Indian Ocean. These devastating tsunamis resulted in the establishment of early tsunami warning systems in tsunami-prone regions, with a prime motivation to detect tsunamis in advance and issue warnings to prevent loss of life and damage. The major components for detecting tsunamis are the detection of tsunamigenic earthquakes, continuous monitoring of sea levels, and numerical simulation of tsunami to estimate the water levels and travel times. The major challenge of estimation is the numerical simulation of tsunamis. Specifically, solving the governing shallow water equations, as an initial value problem on a large domain for a long time interval. In order to contribute to the early warnings, the sooner the simulation time the better.

In the presentation, Dr. Siva Srinivas Kolukula investigates the achievable speed of tsunami propagation simulations on a GPU using Parallel Computing Toolbox™. The governing linear shallow water equations are solved by employing the finite difference method. Using MATLAB^® for simple GPU computing, numerical simulation is accelerated. A good performance in simulation speed is noticed using MATLAB for simple GPUs. The results are compared with real-time water observations in order to validate the MATLAB code and is found to be a good match.