Modeling of Waves with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics on the GPU

Providing an accurate representation of breaking waves is extremely difficult due to the complexity of the free surface, splash-up, and the induced vortical flows in the water. Monaghan (1994) and Dalrymple and Rogers (2004) are examples of using the numerical method Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to model these breaking waves. Both of these studies accurately show the plunging jet and the splash-up of breaking plungers. However, full details of the flow requires highly resolved 3-D calculations. SPH is computational intensive, involving large numbers of computational particles and very small time steps. Recently Herault (2008) has shown that very high resolution and significant speed-ups in model calculation occurs by computing on the graphics card (GPU), rather than the CPU of computers. This use of the GPU is an on-going paradigm shift, which will be shown. Examples of breaking waves, along with a number of example free surface flows, will be shown.