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.