Simulation of pollutant transport in shallow water on a CUDA architecture

Shallow water simulation enables the study of problems such as dam break, river, canal and coastal hydrodynamics, as well as the transport of inert substances, such as pollutants, on a fluid. This article describes a GPU efficient and cost-effective CUDA implementation of a finite volume numerical scheme for solving pollutant transport problems in bidimensional domains. The fluid is modeled by 2D shallow water equations, while the transport of pollutant is modeled by a transport equation. The 2D domain is discretized using a first order finite volume scheme. The evaluation using a realistic problem shows that the implementation makes a good usage of the computational resources, being very efficient for real-life complex simulations. The speedup reached allowed us to complete a simulation in 2 hours in contrast with the 239 hours (10 days) required by a sequential execution in a standard CPU.