Hardware Acceleration of Tsunami Wave Propagation Modeling in the Southern Part of Japan

Abstract

In order to speed up the calculation of tsunami wave propagation, the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) microchip is used. This makes it possible to achieve valuable performance gain with a modern regular personal computer. The two half-step MacCormack scheme was used herein for numerical approximation of the shallow water system. We studied the distribution of tsunami wave maximal heights along the coast of the southern part of Japan. In particular, the dependence of wave maximal heights on the particular tsunami source location was investigated. Synthetic 100 × 200 km sources have realistic parameters corresponding to this region. As observed numerically, only selected parts of the entire coast line are subject to dangerous tsunami wave amplitudes. The particular locations of such areas strongly depend on the location of the tsunami source. However, the extreme tsunami heights in some of those areas can be attributed to local bathymetry. The proposed hardware acceleration to compute tsunami wave propagation can be used for rapid (say, in a few minutes) tsunami wave danger evaluation for a particular village or industrial unit on the coast.