Preprint 2005-021

Visual Simulation of Shallow-Water Waves

Abstract: A commodity-type graphics card (GPU) is used to simulate nonlinear water waves described by a system of balance laws called the shallow-water system. To solve this hyperbolic system we use explicit high-resolution central-upwind schemes, which are particularly well suited for exploiting the parallel processing power of the GPU. In fact, simulations on the GPU are found to run 15--30 times faster than on a CPU. The simulated cases involve dry-bed zones and non-trivial bottom topographies, which are real challenges to the robustness and accuracy of the discretization.

Paper:

Available as PDF (312 Kbytes).

Author(s):

Trond Runar Hagen, <trr@sintef.no>

Jon Mikkelsen Hjelmervik, <jami@sintef.no>

Knut-Andreas Lie, <knl@sintef.no>

Jostein R. Natvig, <jrn@sintef.no>

Martin Ofstad Henriksen, <martinh@sintef.no>

Publishing information:

Accepted in Simulation Practice and Theory Journal: Special Issue on Programmable Graphics Hardware, Elsevier, June 2005.

Comments:

We have also written a more introductory paper. For more information on GPU, see www.gpgpu.org

Submitted by:

<Knut-Andreas.Lie@sintef.no> May 13 2005. Revised September 8 2005.