Visual simulation of shallow-water waves

A commodity-type graphics card (GPU) is used to simulate nonlinear water waves described by a system of balance laws called the shallow-water system. To solve this hyperbolic system we use explicit high-resolution central-upwind schemes, which are particularly well suited for exploiting the parallel processing power of the GPU. In fact, simulations on the GPU are found to run 15–30 times faster than on a CPU. The simulated cases involve dry-bed zones and nontrivial bottom topographies, which are real challenges to the robustness and accuracy of the discretization.