Fast Numerical Solution to Nonlinear Shallow Water System

This chapter presents an acceleration technique for the fast numerical solution to nonlinear shallow water system with the help of a regular personal computer. This chapter helps with the timely evaluation of potential threats from tsunami waves at a particular part of the coast. High performance is achieved by using hardware acceleration which is a specialized Calculator based on the Field Programmable Gates Array (FPGA) microchip. Precision of the obtained numerical solutions was proved by comparing them to the available exact solutions. The achieved performance is comparable to the one of a supercomputer while it takes valuably less energy. The proposed way makes it possible to calculate the wave parameters along the coast (in a water area of several hundred kilometers wide) within a minute, provided that the initial sea surface displacement at tsunami source is given. In case of a major seismic event offshore Japan, it takes nearly 20 min for tsunami waves to reach the nearest coast. The proposed approach can provide tsunami warning centers with decision support information on evacuation measures, industry shutdown, vital goods supply, and other actions before the wave reaches the coast.