Efficient multilayer shallow-water simulation system based on GPUs

Abstract The computational simulation of shallow stratified fluids is a very active research topic because these types of systems are very common in a variety of natural environments. The simulation of such systems can be modeled using multilayer shallow-water equations but do impose important computational requirements, especially when applied to large domains. General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units (GPGPU) has become a vivid research field due to the arrival of massively parallel hardware platforms (based on graphics cards) and adequate programming frameworks which have allowed important speed-up factors with respect to not only sequential but also parallel CPU based simulation systems. In this work we present simulation of shallow stratified fluids with an arbitrary number of layers using GPUs. The designed system does fully adapt to the many-core architecture of modern GPUs and several experiments have been carried out to illustrate its scalability and behavior on different GPU models. We propose a new multilayer computational scheme for an underlying 2D mathematical model. This scheme is capable of handling an arbitrary number of layers. The system adds no overhead when used for two-layer scenarios, compared to an existing 2D system specifically designed for just two layers. Our proposal is aimed at creating a GPU-based computational scheme suitable for the simulation of multilayer large-scale real-world scenarios.