FPGA fast simulation of tsunami wave propagation

The study offers a fast quantitative estimation of tsunami wave heights coming from a hypothetical source along the Pacific coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands. We focus on a very fast (virtually real-time) PC simulation of tsunami wave propagation using the classical approximation of the shallow water theory. Significant performance gains are achieved by taking advantage of modern computer architectures, namely Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The McCormack difference scheme of the second order of approximation for solving the system of shallow water differential equations [1] is implemented with an FPGA chip on a custom PCB designed by the authors [2, 3].
Numerical tests indicate that it takes only a few seconds to simulate a tsunami wave from a simulated source on a 900 m spacing grid to analyze 3,600 time increments of propagation of the tsunami wave propagation in about 2000x2000 km area (3,120x2,400 nodes.) The customized FPGA computer was also tested for accuracy by comparing with the analytical solutions obtained by Marchuk [4, 5] for some reference bottom topographies.