Tsunami Simulation on a PC

Abstract

we designed hardware code acceleration architectures for solving the nonlinear system of shallow water equations, enabling to run it on a PC or other device. We achieved sufficient computational performance to conduct numerical experiments on transoceanic tsunamis. We proposed a method to adjust source parameters based on wave profile data from deep-sea pressure sensors. By optimizing the computational pipeline and implementing the McCormack finite-difference scheme with second-order approximation, we computed values at seven consecutive time steps within a single clock cycle. Using a Xilinx Virtex-7 VC709 chip as a co-processor on a computational grid of 9,601×6,781 nodes, we performed 36,000 time steps with a 3-second interval, simulating 30 hours of wave propagation in just 1,352 seconds (22.5 minutes). We validated our numerical solution against known exact solutions, analyzed how global bathymetric data affect calculations, and justified the use of the nested grid method. The proposed technology enhances our ability to study tsunamis.