Evaluations of OpenCL-written Tsunami Simulation on FPGA and Comparison with GPU Implementation

When a tsunami occurred on a sea area, prediction of its arrival time is critical for evacuating people from the coastal area. There are many problems related to tsunami to be solved for reducing negative effects of this serious disaster. Numerical modeling of tsunami wave propagation is a computationally intensive problem which needs to accelerate its calculations by parallel processing. The method of splitting tsunami (MOST) is one of the well-known numerical solvers for tsunami modeling. We have developed a tsunami propagation code based on MOST algorithm and implemented different parallel optimizations for GPU and FPGA. In the latest study, we have the best performance of OpenCL kernel which is implemented tsunami simulation on AMD Radeon 280X GPU. This paper targets on design and evaluation on FPGA using OpenCL. The performance on FPGA design generated automatically by Altera offline compiler follows the results of GPU by several kernel modifications.