Modeling of Tsunami Equations and Atmospheric Swirling Flows with a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Radial Basis Functions (RBF)

The faster growth curves in the speed of GPUs relative to CPUs in recent years and its rapidly gained popularity has spawned a new area of development in computational technology. There is much potential in utilizing GPUs for solving evolutionary partial differential equations and producing the attendant visualization. We are concerned with modeling tsunami waves, where computational time is of extreme essence, for broadcasting warnings. In order to test the efficacy of the GPU on the set of shallow-water equations, we employed the NVIDIA board 8600M GT on a MacBook Pro. We have compared the relative speeds between the CPU and the GPU on a single processor for two types of spatial discretization based on second-order finite-differences and radial basis functions. RBFs are a more novel method based on a gridless and a multi- scale, adaptive framework. Using the NVIDIA 8600M GT, we received a speed up factor of 8 in favor of GPU for the finite-difference method and a factor of 7 for the RBF scheme. We have also studied the atmospheric dynamics problem of swirling flows over a spherical surface and found a speed-up of 5.3 using the GPU. The time steps employed for the RBF method are larger than those used in finite-differences, because of the much fewer number of nodal points needed by RBF. Thus, in modeling the same physical time, RBF acting in concert with GPU would be the fastest way to go.