Modeling of tsunami waves and atmospheric swirling flows with graphics processing unit (GPU) and radial bias functions (RBF

The faster growth curves in the speed of GPUs relative to CPUs in the past decade and its rapidly gained popularity have spawned a new area of development in computational technology. In the past several years, non-graphical applications have been adapted to the GPU by means of several improved programming models. 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 in broadcasting warnings We have employed the NVIDIA board 8600M GT on a MacPro to test the efficacy of the GPU on the set of shallow-water equations. (We have also tested this with the NVIDIA Quattro FX5600).We have compared the relative speeds between CPU and GPU on a single processor for two types of spatial discretization based on second-order finite-differences and radial basis functions, which is a more novel method based on a gridless and a multi-scale, adaptive framework. For the NVIDIA 8600M GT we found a speedup by a facto